Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2022 - 16

Deere advances in-field autonomy
While stereo cameras and computer vision guide Deere's " limited release "
8R autonomous tractor, Bear Flag's lidar tech will augment future machines.
Q&A with Deere's Joe Liefer
Deere's autonomous 8R Tractor will
begin shipping to farmers this fall.
J
ohn Deere got " really serious " about autonomy
in 2019, according to Joe Liefer, senior product
manager of autonomy at John Deere Intelligent
Solutions Group. Three years later - after
forming an in-house development team and acquiring
some tech-startup expertise - the machinery maker
revealed a fully autonomous tractor at CES 2022 that
it claims is ready for large-scale production.
Based on Deere's 8R tractor, the machine combines
a TruSet-enabled chisel plow, GPS guidance
system, advanced AI and six pairs of stereo cameras
that enable 360-degree obstacle detection and distance
calculation. The autonomous 8R tractor also
continuously checks its position relative to a geofence
and is accurate to within less than 1 inch (25
mm), Deere claims. Farmers monitor and control it
from a smartphone app.
The tractor collected over 50 million images during
in-field testing over the past three years, according to
Deere. Each model is trained with hundreds of thousands
of images, and its neural network classifies
each pixel in about 100 milliseconds, determining
whether the machine continues to move or stops if an
obstacle is detected. Capable of preparing more
than 325 acres of soil in 24 hours, the autonomous
tractor will be available to farmers later in 2022.
Liefer discussed Deere's autonomous tractor and
its ongoing development activities with Grayson
Brulte, host of the SAE Tomorrow Today podcast
(www.sae.org/podcasts/tomorrow-today/episodes).
Highlights from that discussion follow.
16 August 2022
Joe Liefer, senior product manager
of autonomy at John Deere
Intelligent Solutions Group.
" We're developing
one autonomy stack
that'll interface with
Deere vehicles, but
it'll have a modular
approach where we
can add different
sensing modalities
depending on the
job or the machine
form. "
How are farmers approaching
autonomy?
Really, we've developed autonomy at
the request of farmers. Farmers face
incredible challenges every growing
season, time being one of the biggest
challenges: 'I have to do two to three
things at the same time. How do I find
enough people to help me farm this
land or run the equipment?' Farmers
are asking for other ways to add additional
automation and then they've
been requesting autonomy in the last
several years. That's when we got really
serious about it, in 2019. How do we
bring true in-field autonomy to farmers
to be another tool in their toolbox. So,
for the first time as we revealed at
CES, we're giving the farmer the opportunity
to step out of the cab, out of
that tractor seat, and then they can go
do something else - a higher valueadded
job on the farm [or] spending
more time with family, for example.
How do farmers set up and operate
the autonomous tractor?
A farmer drives the tractor to the field
and selects the boundary - they do
some quick setup in the tractor on the
command center for that job. It can
TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
BOTH IMAGES: DEERE
http://www.sae.org/podcasts/tomorrow-today/episodes
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2022

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