In the fully automatic mode, the R8 can handle plowing and dragging, preparing the soil for spring sowing or planting. Fully autonomous. He is alone in the field, unattended in the cabin, yet he moves with an accuracy of two and a half centimeters. Both standard GPS and correction (reference) GPS points from the company’s production help him.
The farmer has an application on his smartphone or tablet in which he sees the necessary data – the position of the tractor on the map, how much is done, how much is still waiting. He sees driving data and fuel condition and parameters of the work performed, he also sees live video from cameras. Everything can be corrected remotely. And in the process, he may devote himself to other tasks.
The autonomous tractor can work practically non-stop, day and night, as long as weather conditions allow. It is only necessary to refuel once every eight to ten hours.
Under the hood
The tractor is equipped with six stereoscopic cameras that cover the full 360 ° surroundings of the machine. The video signal goes to the graphics processors, which process it and analyze it using a model created by machine learning. This artificial intelligence system has been trained on millions of images from different fields in different situations.
This is a raw image from the cameras, which is aimed at computer processing on board the tractor.
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Thanks to the angular difference in the view of both sensors of the stereoscopic camera, the system easily creates a depth map of the surroundings.
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The trained neural network then divides the image into soil (green model), trees (red), sky (blue) and anomalies (yellow).
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Here is the “certainty” of the model for each processed pixel, ie the certainty that he evaluated the place correctly. This is also part of the decision-making process.
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The result of the analysis is the classification of the image into the categories of soil, trees, sky and everything that does not fit is an anomaly.
The system evaluated the obstacle and stopped in front of it. The notification will alert farmers.
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Whether it is a forgotten piece of equipment, an animal or a bag of rubbish, when an anomaly is seen, the tractor stops and sends a notification to the farmer.
He has to evaluate the situation and either solve it remotely or he will reach the place and remove the obstacle.
The autonomous tractor is not the only high-tech innovation that the traditional manufacturer of agricultural machinery plans to launch this year. Another is the See & Spray Select spraying system, in which a number of computer image processing cameras recognize weeds from crops and can spray the herbicide directly onto the weeds. It can correctly detect over ninety percent of weeds, saving more than seventy percent of the herbicide. Which is cost-effective for farmers and quite important for the environment.
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