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Not too long ago, Austin, Texas performed host to the 2023 John Deere Know-how Summit. A choose variety of outstanding journalists, thought leaders and social media influencers within the subject of expertise have been invited to attend this inaugural occasion, the place they discovered concerning the cutting-edge in agtech from John Deere’s expertise executives.
I used to be lucky to be invited to attend this occasion on behalf of The Robotic Report. The occasion featured a full day of in-depth shows and in-field demonstrations on the newly christened John Deere take a look at farm close to Elgin TX, northeast of Austin.
John Deere is a software program firm
John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman kicked off the occasion with a high-level overview of expertise improvement at John Deere (JD). During the last 5 years, the corporate has grown its software program improvement group by 350% and now employs 4,300 software program engineers.
“Our mission by 2030 is to verify each one of many 10 trillion corn and soybean seeds could be planted, cared for, and harvested autonomously. If the farmer chooses to take action, that’s going to require this full complement of the John Deere tech stack”, mentioned Hindman.
Deanna Kovar, John Deere’s VP of Manufacturing and Precision Ag Techniques, took the gang down historical past lane by recapping a few of the key milestones for John Deere precision agriculture since its founding in 1837.
Autosteer is the inspiration
The primary key excessive expertise milestone for John Deere was the introduction of GPS – Navcom within the Nineties. This enabled JD to deploy autosteering for tractors whereas enhancing the accuracy and repeatability of varied crop administration processes. Autosteering additionally helps to scale back the psychological stress for the tractor driver, whereas additionally decreasing the talent degree essential to ship precision agriculture. For the farmer, this allows much less skilled drivers (like teenage kids/grandchildren or farmhands) to drive the tractor with correct outcomes.
Autosteer is now an choice on each trendy John Deere tractor. In the course of the harvest, grain wagons can sync with the mix and match the pace and route of the mix through the grain offloading course of. This easy course of reduces the psychological stress and fatigue on the mix driver and helps with the throughput through the time-critical harvesting course of.
The following massive expertise milestone got here in early 2010 when JD launched IOT infrastructure to the farm that related each machine and farm implement. This was the beginning of the precision agriculture knowledge tsunami and required extra innovation to ingest and course of a rising mountain of information. This data would type the premise of data and decision-making instruments like yield maps, stress maps and chemical utility maps.
Autonomy makes its debut in 2020
Lastly, in 2020, JD launched its first absolutely autonomous tractor, the John Deere 8R, which leverages pc imaginative and prescient and machine studying to allow the tractor to understand the world round it, establish obstacles and safely function with out an onboard operator.
Alongside the best way, JD acquired Blue River Know-how and Bear Flag Robotics to assist infuse the JD engineering group with the IP and technical assets essential to develop on the tempo essential to stay a number one AgTech provider. John Deere additionally maintains a Silicon Valley improvement heart and laboratory the place it helps the accelerating push for innovation.
Tractor autonomy stays a key funding space for JD. Nonetheless, there are different key areas of innovation which are viable for agriculture automation right this moment, together with the planting and spraying workflows.
AI is vital to sensible spraying
One other latest innovation is the See and Spray expertise that JD acquired by means of Blue River Know-how. JD has commercialized this expertise that leverages machine imaginative and prescient and AI/ML to tell apart and establish crop vegetation from weeds after which solely spray the elements of the sector when a weed plant is current. Be aware that this workflow is extremely aggressive with plenty of opponents on this house utilizing all the pieces from lasers, to robotic weeding implements, to vision-guided chemical purposes.
The newest era of the See and Spray answer now consists of an auto-leveling carbon fiber increase together with twin nozzles that may ship two totally different chemical compounds in a single move.
John Deere expertise helps farmers get monetary savings
In planting, the important thing innovation known as ExactShot and is concentrated on optimizing some of the essential processes in farming. Mechanized seed drills have been round for lots of of years. Till just lately, nevertheless, the basic seed drill was “open loop” the place the farmer would arrange the seed drill, run it for a few minutes after which cease the tractor, and undergo the planted seed furrows to find out the success of the planting course of by digging by means of the planted floor with a screwdriver. He would then make some mechanical changes, run it for just a few extra minutes, cease, recheck, and so forth. This course of didn’t simply account for native soil variability between fields and even inside a given subject. The outcomes weren’t optimized with some particular person vegetation affected by insufficient planting depth.
With ExactShot “Rowbots” mixed with ExactEmerage and a brand new fertilizing answer referred to as SureShot, John Deere is utilizing sensors, imaginative and prescient cameras, machine studying and onboard processing to utterly optimize the planting course of. The ExactEmerge system can see the profile of the furrow in real-time and make changes to the discs to create an ideal seedbed for each seed, whilst topsoil situations change. ExactEmerge is able to planting over 40 seeds per second, 12 hours per day.
The SureShot expertise (see video under) sprays a shot of fertilizer on every seed, optimizing fertilizer utilization. Older generations of expertise would merely spray a continuing quantity of fertilizer all through the method, losing any fertilizer not instantly subsequent to a seed. As much as 54 ExactShot planting Rowbots could be configured in parallel on a contemporary planting platform.
Tillage is the primary workflow to be absolutely automated by the brand new John Deere 8R autonomous tractor. There are a few key explanation why tillage is a candidate for automation. To start with, tillage occurs instantly after harvest, a time when the farmer is commonly busy getting the harvest to market.
Secondly, the tillage implement is “dumb.” It merely must be dragged by means of the soil and the accuracy is much less crucial than with planting or harvesting. Additionally, in contrast to planting or harvesting, there’s nothing to reload or offload from the tractor/implement. Which means that the autonomous tractor can run till it must be refueled, which could be as much as 8 hours. Lastly, tillage is a course of that’s usually performed by farm fingers or the following era (children or grandkids), and this can be a key space of labor scarcity for a lot of farmers right this moment.
The online result’s that tillage is a key goal marketplace for autonomous tractors, and John Deere is deploying numerous autonomous tractors into the sector this upcoming rising season. As autonomy improves and turns into extra sturdy, autonomous tractors will probably be deployed into different workflows in future years.
In March 2023, John Deere acquired SparkAI, an organization that developed a “human within the loop” expertise and course of to assist get well autonomous autos once they grew to become confused or encountered an edge case in impediment detection/notion. JD has been working with SparkAI for the final couple of years and can now absolutely make use of this expertise to assist enhance buyer expertise with the tractors within the subject.
Rural high-speed bandwidth is a barrier to autonomy
Excessive-speed connectivity is the one big hurdle that is still to the profitable deployment of autonomous tractors. John Deere 8R autonomous tractors can solely function when there’s a high-speed, high-bandwidth connection to the tractor and to the farmer. That is required primarily to attach the tractor to the farmer who can remotely management the tractor operation through a cellphone or pill. The second requirement is for the human-in-the-loop (SparkAI) performance, which is the primary line of assist for JD.
Farms or fields which lack a high-speed mobile connection cannot presently function an autonomous 8R tractor. Brazil is a key agricultural marketplace for John Deere and it, sadly, can be one of many international locations with a low share of rural high-speed connectivity protection. Thus, Brazil is more likely to be locked out of utilizing autonomous tractors till the connectivity problem is resolved.
John Deere is actively exploring options to this downside, together with the potential partnership with low-earth orbiting, high-speed bandwidth connecting satellite tv for pc networks. I’d predict both a deep partnership or acquisition of certainly one of these firms within the close to future, as that is crucial to John Deere’s future autonomous roadmap.
John Deere take a look at farm
One of many classic John Deere tractors on show on the new John Deere Austin take a look at farm. | Credit score: The Robotic Report
On the second day of the occasion, John Deere hosted the media at its new Austin take a look at farm about 40 miles northeast of downtown. On the farm, we have been allowed to see, contact and experience on all the gear in operation at a number of demo stations across the property. The corporate bought the property in Texas in order that testing of recent expertise can occur 12 months out of the 12 months, and preserve tempo with the accelerating expertise innovation curve in AgTech.
Take a look at the newest episode of The Robotic Report Podcast the place Steve Crowe and I recap the JD Tech Summit and speak to Jorge Heraud, VP of Autonomay at JD:
