# Driverless Tractors



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

They are here...don't leave those old school tractors and rakes too close to field perimeters!

Regards, Mike

http://farmindustrynews.com/blog/driverless-tractor-getting-closer-farms


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## rjmoses (Apr 4, 2010)

I might be a control freak but did you ever think what could happen to driverless cars/tractors/... if the GPS system ever crashed?

Ralph

I am still a better driver drunk than most people are sober.


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## mlappin (Jun 25, 2009)

Need one of those for corn harvest, have been short on help all fall, 2 of my helpers haven't been laid off yet from the operating engineers and the other everytime he thinks he can help his wife's shingles comes back and she's laid back up. Were getting it done but on half mile long rows only thing we can do is both of us stay in the field, get all the trucks full, fill the cart and combine then take em home and dump everything and start over, not overly productive if the combine aint moving.


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## BWfarms (Aug 3, 2015)

rjmoses said:


> I might be a control freak but did you ever think what could happen to driverless cars/tractors/... if the GPS system ever crashed?
> 
> Ralph
> I am still a better driver drunk than most people are sober.


That's a matter of opinion Sparky!


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## BWfarms (Aug 3, 2015)

I usually look forward to a day on the tractor, but then again I think I have the best career in the world. I will never buy a driverless tractor, that will probably take the unexplainable feeling away.


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## hillside hay (Feb 4, 2013)

Nothing electronic ever fails though. I don't see a problem with a 300 HP 4 wheel drive tractor in C 3 with no operator on the river flat near town. I'm sure it couldn't make it through more than half a dozen buildings or so


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## Thorim (Jan 19, 2015)

Can you say the Rise of the Machines lol


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

mlappin said:


> Need one of those for corn harvest, have been short on help all fall, 2 of my helpers haven't been laid off yet from the operating engineers and the other everytime he thinks he can help his wife's shingles comes back and she's laid back up. Were getting it done but on half mile long rows only thing we can do is both of us stay in the field, get all the trucks full, fill the cart and combine then take em home and dump everything and start over, not overly productive if the combine aint moving.


If you'd have said something, I'd have gladly come work for you when I finished at my BIL's over in Rochester, IN, three weeks or so ago... We finished his harvest in record time this year...

Been back in Texas a week or two and just hauled calves over the weekend with my brother... Coulda used the extra money... 

Later! OL JR


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

BTW, this is nothing "new"... There were driverless tractors back when they all had steel wheels...

They used to make a "guide wheel" that would drop into the plow furrow... the farmer would make one pass around the field to make a continuous plow furrow for the tractor to follow, then he could drop the guide wheel in the furrow, put the tractor in gear, and jump off the back... the tractor would follow the guide wheel around the field plowing continuously, with the guide wheel following the furrow, until the field was done...

Course, sometimes the guide wheel would jump out of the furrow or something and the tractor would plow cross-country, plowing down fencelines or out into the woods or whatever until it ran into something and stalled out... but still, it was a driverless tractor!

This new GPS stuff is just an extension of the same old idea...

Thing is, there's a difference between a "tractor driver" and an OPERATOR... you can put a trained chimp in the seat of a tractor and have them DRIVE it... (and in some cases would be better off with a trained chimp than some of the help you can get nowdays...) A good OPERATOR watches and listens and sees what kind of job his machine is doing, watches for abnormalities, stops and checks to see that everything is working right (not just trusts the monitor or the GPS or whatever else to "tell" him that everything is working correctly) and knows how to make the proper adjustments or knows when something needs repairs to get the job done right and prevent damage to the machine...

The other thing about these "driverless tractors" is, okay, you can hitch it up to the disk or plow and get it set up to work up a field... program in the disk or plow width so it doesn't leave streaks or overlap too much, etc... but what happens when the disk picks up a rock and locks up a gang and is pulling 5 yards of corn stalks and dirt along with it, or a bearing goes out and the races are running steel on steel, or a disk axle snaps or a spring gang cushion spring breaks and the whole gang is running out of kilter, or a plow beam trips or whatever else... no eyes to see, and unless the thing is wired with sensors to monitor EVERYTHING on the implement and the job it's doing, it's going to keep going until it bogs down, stalls out, or something else REALLY gets broke and the whole thing FINALLY grinds to a halt... then it'll ring you cell phone with a cry for help... and you'll be fixing stuff for a week that a good operator would have caught when it was still an hour long $100 repair...

Turn the thing loose planting or something-- you STILL have to have someone tending to the planter, refilling the boxes and hoppers and keeping an eye on it to make sure everything is working as advertised... it won't know when it picks up a rock between two planter units and one is dragging a foot deep trench in the field while holding the next unit up off the ground scattering seed everywhere instead of planting it...

I can see where Europe is experimenting with driverless semi's... and I can see the logic where it'd make sense even here in the US for interstate depot-to-depot type trucking... hitch a driverless semi-tractor to a trailer in the dock yards in California, program it to drive to the company regional trucking center in say Chicago, and send it on its merry way... It monitors itself, if it detects a problem, it shuts down on the side of the road and calls central dispatch for help... if not it continues, stops at pre-programmed service centers for fueling or service as needed, and continues on to the destination... unhook the driverless semi from the trailer, hook it to an empty or another back-haul, and send it on its merry way again...

With farm equipment that not only has to have sensors to say "yep, the disk/plow/planter is still back there and the wheels have air and are turning and nothing is on fire" but has to be able to monitor that things are actually WORKING CORRECTLY, I don't see the point... SOMEBODY has to check up on the thing and babysit it to make sure it's working right...

Unless of course they don't have a problem coming out to a 200 acre field later that day and finding that while it was set up right for the first two rounds and did the entire field and then stopped, on the fifth round it locked up a disk gang and just dragged a haystack around the field for the next 10 hours and it's all got to be done again anyway...

Later! OL JR


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## shortrow (Feb 21, 2012)

I put my brother-in-law on a tractor once when i was short-handed. As close to driverless as possible, luckily nobody was hurt.


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## luke strawwalker (Jul 31, 2014)

shortrow said:


> I put my brother-in-law on a tractor once when i was short-handed. As close to driverless as possible, luckily nobody was hurt.


LOL Sounds like my brother in law's nephew...

Later! OL JR


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## Teslan (Aug 20, 2011)

rjmoses said:


> I might be a control freak but did you ever think what could happen to driverless cars/tractors/... if the GPS system ever crashed?
> 
> Ralph
> 
> I am still a better driver drunk than most people are sober.


I'm pretty sure that there are safeties if the GPS system crashed to shut down. However safeties can fail. I've seen that time and time again with pivot sprinklers.


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