John Deere's Robotic Tractor is The Result of Years of Investment in AI-Powered Farming

When John Deere debuted its first-ever autonomous tractor at CES 2022, it signaled a new era of AI & robotic farming would soon be upon us. While other companies have been talking about autonomous tractors for some time, it's an altogether different matter when the U.S.'s biggest manufacturer of farming equipment signals that this is the future. Still in the trial phase, early versions of the 8R are now being tested by what the company describes as its "paying test cooperators." But since it won't be long before the final production model of the autonomous tractor is rolling off the production line, I thought it would be a good time to sit down with one of the company's computer vision leads, Chris Padwick, the Director of Computer Vision and Machine Learning at Deere's Blue River Technology division, to get an idea of the how the company got to this point. According to Padwick, since its acquisition by John Deere in 2017, Blue River has helped accelerate the farming equipment giant into precision agriculture with its "see and spray" computer vision technology.