Food & agriculture · 2022

Autonomous tractor

A production tractor that tills a field on its own, watched from a smartphone.

John Deere unveiled its driverless 8R tractor in 2022, using stereo cameras and neural networks to detect obstacles. Robotics is also spreading to weeding and fruit picking, where farm labour is scarcest.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 2

Deep learning (AlexNet) 2012
Precision agriculture 1996

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Cereal yield Latest: 4.21 t/ha (2024) Source: Our World in Data