We Drove an Autonomous John Deere Tractor With Just an iPhone

MotorTrend

We were in Vegas. The tractor was in Austin—1

Transcript

00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:03 Hi from the John Deere booth at CES in Las Vegas,

00:12 where we're going to drive a tractor from Austin.

00:15 The tractor is in Austin, and we're here in Vegas.

00:17 We're going to drive it remotely with this iPhone, which

00:20 is really cool.

00:20 So we've got Doug here, who's with John Deere.

00:22 He's going to show us a little bit about how

00:24 this is going to work.

00:25 So our tractor is out there.

00:26 This is live footage, right?

00:28 So as a farm manager, I want to be

00:31 able to keep an eye on this autonomous equipment

00:33 and understand what's happening.

00:35 So I can see the field that it's working in.

00:37 I can look at some of the key performance

00:39 and see how many acres have been done in the last hour.

00:42 And now, let's say that I want to go ahead and stop it.

00:47 I want to--

00:48 Wait, wait.

00:48 Before you do that, before you do that,

00:51 to basically make sure that we're not just

00:54 like doing a hoax or whatever, we actually

00:56 did send Motor Trend editor Alexander Stoklosa out

00:59 to that field in Austin.

01:00 He's in that little gator that's out there

01:03 to verify that this is actually what we're doing.

01:05 So we are going to stop the tractor,

01:08 and we're going to see if Alex can say definitively if we

01:11 have stopped it in real life.

01:13 You can stop the tractor with this pause button, right?

01:15 That's right.

01:16 You can see that it says it's working right now.

01:18 I'm going to hit this pause button right here,

01:20 and within just a couple of seconds,

01:22 you're going to see the tractor come to a stop.

01:25 That's so cool.

01:27 Can I start it again?

01:28 You can.

01:28 So if you hit this resume button--

01:31 OK.

01:31 --go ahead and do that.

01:32 Start.

01:33 And what you'll see now, look up on the screen,

01:35 you'll see that it is in a warning sequence.

01:37 That's going to make some sounds and flash some lights

01:40 and make sure that no one, that anyone that is around

01:43 is aware for safety reasons.

01:44 And just in a couple of seconds, start back up and take off

01:48 again, and there you go.

01:49 That's so cool.

01:50 OK, what else can I do here?

01:51 You can adjust some speed.

01:53 So let's say that you--

01:54 let's say rain's coming.

01:55 All right.

01:55 And you want to get this job done even faster.

01:57 You can just dial up from five miles an hour.

02:00 Let's go up to six miles an hour.

02:02 Oh, man.

02:02 We're cooking now.

02:04 That's right.

02:05 And if you notice, this is a remote display

02:07 in the bottom right corner.

02:08 You can see you've got that machine working

02:10 at six miles an hour now.

02:13 Can I slow it all the way down to like--

02:14 You can slow it back down to four if you'd like.

02:16 What's the slowest speed?

02:18 Maybe a couple of miles an hour.

02:20 Now, if you'd like to see a live--

02:22 we'd like to see a live view of what

02:23 the tractor is actually seeing.

02:25 Yes, absolutely.

02:26 Show me everything.

02:27 So let's touch the live view.

02:28 Live view.

02:29 That's going to activate the camera feed.

02:35 So let's take a look here.

02:36 So imagine I'm a farmer.

02:37 I might be 10 miles or 1,300 miles away,

02:41 and I want to be able to see what--

02:43 this is the rear camera.

02:46 So let's say I wanted to get a sense of the job quality

02:49 that was going on.

02:49 I see Alex's shadow.

02:50 You can see the shadow of the gator.

02:52 I can touch on the speed.

02:54 Now I want to see out the front.

02:56 So this is out the front of the tractor.

02:58 If I wanted to just check on what the field conditions are

03:00 really looking like.

03:02 So really, this really is true that the farmer can be in more

03:05 than one place at a time.

03:07 I could be driving another piece of equipment

03:09 in a different field and still keeping

03:11 an eye on what's happening.

03:13 And you said this technology's been around for a couple

03:16 of years now, and you are rolling it out commercially.

03:18 That's right.

03:18 Yes, we have paying customers in seven states.

03:22 We're in the initial stages of that commercial rollout,

03:25 and it'll be expanding even further as we go forward.

03:28 Now would it be possible to have a person sitting in there

03:33 while it's also driving autonomously?

03:35 Is that allowed?

03:36 We do have a ride along mode.

03:37 So if the farmer wanted to gain some confidence in how

03:40 the system worked to be able to be in the scene,

03:42 that is possible to do.

03:44 Yeah, for sure.

03:45 Well, this is awesome.

03:46 Thank you so much for showing us--

03:47 You bet.

03:48 --this new piece of technology.

03:50 Awesome.

03:50 Thanks for coming.

03:51 Thanks, guys.

03:52 Story Up at Motor Trend.

03:53 Visit it.

03:54 Read it.

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