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John Deere Self-Driving Tractor
The future of farming is starting to flower!
Hall slides into the driver's seat of a new John Deere row-crop tractor, preparing for our test drive. His seat is flanked on the right with an array of iPads, touchscreens, and control panels, which slightly obscure a wraparound windshield encasing the two-seater cockpit. With a few taps on an iPad, he checks that the system is ready for seed disbursement, citing terms like row population, back pressure, and singulation. The tractor eases into motion, and after a few more control checks, Hall sits back, hands folded comfortably in his lap.
The tractor is driving itself.
(Via How self-driving tractors, AI, and precision agriculture will save us from the impending food crisis.)
This idea is not new to science fiction readers. Scientifiction writer Otfrid von Hanstein wrote about the idea of farms with machines capable of running themselves in his 1935 story The Hidden Colony:
Machines that seemingly with full consciousness walked out into the fields to do their daily work. And even now there was no living being among them save myself... Had these machines in some incredible fashion been provided with brains?
Marcus Hall was nine years old when he first drove a tractor on his family's sprawling Iowa farm, eschewing Tonka trucks and Matchbox cars for long rides on heavy machinery...
(Conscious autonomous farm robot)
(Read more about autonomous farm machines)
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 2/13/2019)
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Related News Stories - (" Agriculture ")
Fully Electric, Fully Automated Vegetable‑growing Agribots
'...then back to their work, though little enough it was on these automatic cultivators.' - John Campbell, 1931.
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'A small electric tractor was working at the far side, and a slight hum could be heard from where he sat.' - Warner Van Lorne, 1936
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