John Deere unveiled its next generation of autonomous agriculture, construction, and commercial landscaping equipment Tuesday at the massive Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

The Illinois based company revealed the second generation of its autonomy kit, which combines advanced computer vision, artificial intelligence, and cameras to help machines navigate terrain.

Jahmy Hindman is a senior vice president and chief technology officer for Deere and Company. He says the autonomy technology is moving forward quickly.

“When we talk about autonomy, we mean fully autonomy, no one’s in the machine. Using John Deere operations centre app on a smart phone, customers can interact with the machine, they can monitor the machine’s activity and they can see performance data. They watch the work being done but they don’t have to worry about who is going to do the work today.” Hindman said.

Autonomy specialists Willy Pell and Matt Potter talked about some of the improvements made over the past three years, including multiple cameras overlapping one another to allow the machine to operate “with wider baselines and have more accurate depth at greater range.

“In a nutshell, it allows us to see further and seeing further allows us to drive the machines 40 per cent faster and pull implements twice as wide as before,” they said. “These are substantial increases in productivity and adds more value through time savings with autonomy.”

Pell and Potter also said the autonomy kit can be retro-fitted to existing large tractors to accomplish tasks like spring & fall tillage, planting, and grain-cart operation. The kit is also durable.

Hindman says the new technology will ease the ongoing labor challenges in the agriculture sector, such as an aging producer workforce where the average age of a U.S. farmer is over 58-years-old and roughly 2.4 million farm job vacancies according to the American Farm Bureau Federation. He also said the construction and landscaping industries are also facing labour shortages. In the construction industry, Hindman notes 88 per cent of contractors are struggling to find skilled labour and are “tasked with closing the world’s $15-trillion infrastructure gap by 2040.” In the landscaping industry, he noted 86 per cent of business owners struggle with finding labour to fill open positions.

Apart from the two autonomous tractors, Deere also displayed a dump truck for quarries and a battery electric commercial landscaping mower, all of them equipped with multiple cameras to facilitate full autonomy.

(CJWW)