Deere & Co. revealed at CES on Tuesday that it has produced a fully-autonomous tractor that is ready for large-scale production and is expected to be available to farmers later this year.
Deere
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shares finished up 6.1% at $371.29 in the regular session. The stock is up 39% over the past 12 months, compared with a 30% gain on the S&P 500 index
SPX,
The company said the autonomous model is made up of an 8R tractor, a TruSet enabled chisel plow, a GPS guidance system, and other technologies. All a farmer needs to do is put the machine in a field, configure it, and let it go to work, and the farmer can monitor the work through a mobile device, Deere said.
The tractor uses six pairs of stereo cameras for 360-degree obstacle detection that’s fed through a deep neural network to decide whether it should proceed or not, along with the GPS monitoring to within an inch whether the tractor is within the geofence established by the farmer, Deere said.
