Tesla’s self-driving car may be all the rage, but for Minnesota farmer Doug Nimz, that’s old news: he’s been testing autonomous technology on his 2,000-acre corn and soybean farm for John Deere for four years.
In early January, John Deere announced its fully autonomous farming tractor to the world in CES 2022. Rather than creating a wholly brand-new tractor, the company improved its popular self-steering 8R tractor by adding two things: a 12 stereo camera system and an Nvidia GPU that let the farmer control the tractor from a smartphone.
John Deere’s autonomous tractor system relies on a camera pod of 3 pairs of stereo cameras located at the front of the tractor. The cameras act like human eyes: images taken by the left- and right-side cameras are combined to let the tractor identify obstacles 45 to 90 feet ahead.
While an autonomous tractor would surely help the agriculture industry, where labor is an ever-present problem, John Deere is not without its critics. For one, the new autonomous tractor is priced at $500,000 - a cost that puts it out-of-reach of many small farmers.
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