4 ms·
I have plowed before with tractors of this size. (Actually, the tractor I drove was larger.) The article doesn't cover it, but I would be curious about the real
by bmitc 5y ago
I have plowed before with tractors of this size. (Actually, the tractor I drove was larger.) The article doesn't cover it, but I would be curious about the real world logistics of such a tractor. For example, how does it know about the soil conditions and thus whether to stop or continue plowing? (Plowing wet soil is not good.) How does it sense when there's a flat tire on the plow? How does it sense when a duck foot (aka blade or chisel) has broken, come loose, etc.? What's the UX of starting or stopping it and transferring to another field? I would love to see how it handles trees, telephone/electrical poles, ditches, fences, etc. when driving and plowing. These were all things that I had to deal with or pay attention to.
- farmin 5y agoThis is good question. Soil conditions are variable and I doubt it is sensing absolutely everything as suggested above. A better application for autonomous tractor I reckon is as optical sprayer that is linkage mounted. E.g WeedIt, Weedseeker or Deere's own solution. I think handling trees etc should not be a problem as one, these should already be mapped as part of paddock setup and two, 'seeing' unusual objects and just stopping and notifying for human intervention is pretty simple.
- z3t4 5y agoThe simple answer is that they probably don't - yet. The software need to be hardened... If you have thousands of operational vehicles you will find the "bugs" quickly though, the question is how fast they can iterate and come up with models that identifies and handle these conditions.
- cpuguy83 5y agoMy guess? The system is being fed real-time data from other sensors (re: soil condition). Everything else can have sensors on board, cars do this.