Agricultural and heavy-equipment maker John Deere took the wraps off its second-generation autonomy kit at CES 2025 after introducing a self-driving tractor three years ago.
During a preview press event held in November 2024 at the company’s R&D centre in the US state of California, CTO Jahmy Hindman explained the new uses cases all have the common theme of solving labour shortages across agriculture, construction and landscaping environments.
“Every one of these verticals, every one of these industries, is challenged with finding the right amount of qualified labour, or even sometimes unqualified labour, to do the work when they need the work done,” he said. “There are 2.5 million farm jobs that are difficult to fill on an annual basis just in this country alone. That’s a staggering number.”
The company is using its second-generation autonomy kit across large field and orchard tractors, articulated dump trucks (ADTs) in rock quarries and an electric mower for commercial landscaping.
In each instance, the tractors, truck and mower map out a field, lawn or quarry road with the help of a human.
Once the boundaries are established, they run continuously while John Deere’s mobile app gives users access to live video feeds on phones and tablets of data collected by sensors.
Tech stack
The company largely depends on 4G connectivity from AT&T to provision connectivity across North America, but started using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband service in late 2024 in several remote areas in the US and Brazil.
Real-time data collected includes on the depth of equipment such as ploughs, the distance between furrows in a field or upcoming obstacles during operations.
Willy Pell, CEO of John Deere-owned Blue River Technology, said the company is using Nvidia Orin GPUs for its vision processing unit to power autonomy.
It also features an internally developed receiver, called StarFire, which is GPS and global navigation satellite system-based.
Big agriculture
John Deere’s xr9 autonomous tractor for large-scale agriculture operations across wheat and soybean fields uses an array of 16 sensor-equipped cameras, four more than the first iteration, to provide a 360-degree view around the machine.
While there are various steps that need to be choreographed for farming large fields, such as tilling, planting and harvesting, John Deere aims to have fully autonomous tillage for corn and soybean fields available in the US by 2030.
Orchards
For fruit and nut orchards, John Deere is provisioning smaller 5ml series tractors with the autonomous kit for spraying trees in confined, dense fields.
Spraying fruit and nut trees is a labour-intensive process that typically requires up to ten-hours per day, six-to-eight-times per season.
John Deere’s autonomous diesel tractor, designed for pulling a sprayer in orchards, uses nine cameras, Lidar and sensors to help the tractors see their surroundings. Currently, it takes about four employees to run the spray rigs and a fifth for driving the tendering tractor.
Landscaping
The company’s autonomous commercial electric mower uses a lot of the same hardware and software as the tractors. The zero-radius turn mower has four pairs of stereo cameras to enable a 360-degree view. It comes equipped with 21.4kWh of energy in its battery.
Hindman stated the battery is important for emission and hydrocarbon reasons but also for noise abatement since mowing operations are typically conducted in the early morning or late at night.
Quarries
The company’s ADT is the first autonomous vehicle in its construction equipment portfolio. The ADT is 34 feet long and 12 feet high and can carry over 92,000 pounds of material.
“While we are reusing many parts of our Deere tech stack, we are also adding to it, and that’s because a quarry and a jobsite does look very different than objects,” said Maya Sripadam (pictured, right), senior product manager, autonomy at Blue River Technology.
Those enhancements include the ability to see objects ahead of time on a quarry road to slow down or pull aside for an oncoming truck.
Hindman said expanding the company’s autonomous technology across construction, tree spraying and landscaping is a testament to the power of its tech stack.
He noted while there is no one in a cab or on one of the machines, the fully autonomous applications are tethered remotely to users through the mobile app.
“There is human engagement with the machine. There has to be,” he said.
A representative for John Deere told Mobile World Live the machines will be available to a limited number of customers and companies for testing in 2025.
Comments