Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2022 - 17

AUTONOMOUS FEATURE
To enable autonomous operation,
farmers drive the tractor to a
field and do a quick setup on the
command center before exiting
the cab and starting the job from
a smartphone.
take 60 seconds and then they step out of the cab and
pull out their smartphone, connect to John Deere
Operations Center Mobile, and from there they can start
the job and that's how they continue to monitor it, stop
it and make remote adjustments. Also, they now for the
first time can see live video from any of our six stereo
cameras that are on this new autonomous 8R.
There are all kinds of technology that ties the John
Deere Precision Ag suite together into one seamless
product. But then we also add more enhancements to
the current tech to give them true field context and
true controllability of the equipment from a smartphone.
If there's an operational decision that needs to
be made, like say something unexpected is in the field,
they're going to get a push notification, be able to
open their cell phone and...give the system permission
to route around an object and keep doing the job.
Then they can go back later and remove that object
and clean up the field.
Is there a limit for how many autonomous tractors
can run at once?
Ultimately, it's really a grower preference on how they
want to size equipment and how many tractors, combines,
sprayers that they want to manage in order to
cover their acres. From a tech standpoint, what we revealed
in 2022 is one autonomous tractor operating in
the field at any given time. But John Deere already has
technology where we do what we call 'coverage map
sharing' or allowing multiple machines to work in the
field at the same time. As we go forward here into 2023
and beyond, we will enable autonomy to follow that
same suit where you could have multiple pieces of
equipment jointly doing path planning and job optimiTRUCK
& OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
Each model is trained with hundreds of thousands of images, and its neural
network classifies each pixel in about 100 milliseconds.
zation together in the field. And so then not only could you have multiple
machines in a field, but you could have multiple autonomous machines
in your fleet and in a number of fields that you're managing.
Will Deere's See & Spray technology be integrated into
autonomous machines?
We just introduced See & Spray Ultimate [in March 2022], that's really
making the equipment superhuman. We're going to listen to our
farmers and understand where they want to take autonomy next. We
started in fall tillage because that's where farmers have a tremendous
amount of labor pressure. We're continuing to talk to farmers as
[they experience] this type of technology for the first time. The conversations
before they've actually seen our autonomous 8R and then
after they've used it - controlled this 40,000-pound machine from
August 2022 17
BOTH IMAGES: DEERE
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - August 2022

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