John Deere CTO Jahmy Hindman said the company was “taking four giant leaps forward” with the release of its latest autonomous machines this week at the CES show in Las Vegas.
At a press conference, Deere announced multiple new machines, including the “Autonomous 9RX Tractor for Large-Scale Agriculture” and the “Autonomous 5ML Orchard Tractor for Air Blast Spraying.”
It also unveiled a quarry operations machine and an autonomous electric mower for landscaping businesses.
Across industries, labor is the main driver for expanding automation capabilities, Hindman said onstage at the press conference.
“There simply isn’t enough available and skilled labor to do that work in a timely and efficient manner,” he noted, adding that this was due to factors like an aging demographic on the farm and rural-to-urban migration.
‘No one’s in the machine’
“When we talk about autonomy we mean full autonomy — no one’s in the machine,” Hindman said of the autonomous 9RX tractor, which can be managed via the John Deere Operations Center app on a smartphone.
John Deere unveiled its first commercially available, fully autonomous tractor at CES in 2022.
The new machine includes 16 individual cameras that provide a 360-degree view of the field for navigation and obstacle detection.
“This perception system has a different number of cameras and camera locations, expanding the visibility in comparison to the 2022 reveal,” a spokesperson for John Deere told AgFunderNews. “With this latest announcement, we have now expanded compatibility from 8R wheel machines (2022 announcement) to select 8R, 8RX, 9R and 9RX machines (MY20.5 and newer 8R and 8RX tractors and MY22 and newer 9R and 9RX tractors).”
Whereas the 2022 release focused specifically on fall tillage, the new version “will be able to do every job a tractor does on the farm,” said the company, including fall and spring tillage, planting and grain cart operation.
Bringing autonomy to high value crops
The autonomous 5ML orchard tractor addresses challenges with air blast spraying for pest control in high value crops such as fruits, nuts and vegetables, said John Deere director Igino Cafiero at the press conference.
“It’s exhausting, its repetitive, but it’s absolutely necessary to protect those trees from pests,” he said of current air blast methods, which involve driving up and down rows of trees for 10 hours per day at two miles per hour — all at night.
Lidar systems on the tractor help the GPS “see” its surroundings using lasers to measure distances, enabling better obstacle detection and navigation of terrain.
While the initial machine will be arrive with a diesel engine, a battery-electric tractor “of comparable size and capacity to existing diesel 5M/ML models” is forthcoming, said the company.
According to Deere’s spokesperson, the company will release the orchard tractor commercially but hasn’t yet announced a timeline for that.
The autonomy kit for tillage will launch “later in 2025,” the spokesperson added.
