Deere's Autonomous Ag Tractor: A Closer Look

John Deere introduced its latest agricultural technology innovations at CES 2025 this week in Las Vegas. At CES, an annual tradeshow where companies from multiple sectors unveil their newest technological breakthroughs, Deere presented its advancements in camera, LiDAR, guidance, telematics, autonomy and machine learning (ML) to improve the functionality of heavy equipment in agriculture, construction and mining and turf care. These new features are more than the latest trends, they are responses to customer demand for increased efficiency on farms, construction jobsites and commercial lawns.

Deere officials hosted a media event in November to preview these advancements and explained that the labor shortage in these industries is significantly hampering the amount of work and projects contractors are able to take on. Agriculture is short 70,000 workers, while construction needs another 500,000 workers, according to U.S. Census Bureau and industry association reports. Of the agriculture, construction and lawn and landscaping businesses that use Deere equipment, 60 to 88% report labor shortages, officials said.

Deere's latest display system for large ag tractors.John Deere

"We're using autonomy not just to solve labor challenges but to develop solutions that truly benefit humanity—whether it's growing food, building infrastructure, or creating green spaces everyone can enjoy,” said Jahmy Hindman, John Deere's senior vice president and chief technology officer, at the press event previewing the company's latest autonomous technology.

This week, Deere is unveiling its latest iteration in autonomous mowers, as well as its first autonomous construction equipment: an articulated dump truck (ADT) for use in mining and quarry environments, as well as autonomous tractors used in agriculture. Deere serves several industries, including row crop and orchard agricultural sectors. At CES, the heavy equipment unveiled with these technologies included:

• Autonomous 9RX Tractor for large-scale agriculture: Featuring 16 individual cameras arranged in arrays to enable a 360-degree view of the field, farmers can step away from the machine and focus on other work. The autonomy kit also calculates depth more accurately at larger distances, allowing the tractor to pull more equipment and drive faster.
• Autonomous 5ML Orchard Tractor for air blast spraying: Protecting crops through air blast spraying is a challenging and repetitive job. Featuring an autonomy kit with added LiDAR sensors to address the dense canopies found in orchards, the initial machine will be offered with a diesel engine. A battery electric tractor of comparable size and capacity to existing diesel 5M/ML models on the market today will follow. 
• 460 P-Tier Autonomous Articulated Dump Truck (ADT) for quarry operations: Quarries supply the raw materials vital for building roads, buildings, and infrastructure, and it’s a complex process to mine, process, and transport materials. Using the second-generation kit, the ADT will handle the repetitive tasks of transporting material around the quarry to facilitate different steps in the cycle.
• Autonomous Battery Electric Mower for commercial landscaping: The autonomous commercial mower uses the same camera technology as other Deere autonomous machines, but on a reduced scale since the machine has a smaller footprint. With two cameras on the front, left, right, and rear, 360-degree coverage is achieved.

A camera array creates 360 degrees of visibility around the 9RX.John Deere

Challenges in Agriculture

In agriculture, the average age of a farmer in the United States is 58 years old, and works 12 to 18 hours a day, especially during planting and harvesting seasons. In addition to those long hours, there are too few people available to complete the work needed on farms. For the ag industry, it’s a struggle to find available labor to fill the 2.4 million jobs that need to be filled annually, Hindman said.

“We’re taking a tech stack that we’ve developed over the better part of two or three decades; many of you are familiar with pieces of that, of our guidance solutions, our Gen-5 (G5) displays or telematics gateways,” he said. “We’re taking these bits and pieces of hardware and software that have bee, I would argue, pretty intelligently crafted over the last few decades, to form a system that we can cascade across all of these verticals, across all of these industries.”

While agriculture, construction, mining and turf care are very different applications with different needs and requirements, there are many shared similarities across these industries. There are several technologies that have been developed in these different applications, as well in past machines, that can be used to create a universal platform to allow Deere to scale the new technologies quickly.

“This (row crop) field looks very different from this quarry, which looks very different from manicured grounds,” Hindman said. “But the technology that we can deploy to make autonomy happen in these spaces is remarkable. And that speaks to scale. It speaks to our ability to get solutions into the market quickly and leverage investments that we’ve already made in the past to produce solutions for the future.”

The 9RX.John Deere

How the Autonomy Works in Deere Machines

Deere has unveiled its first autonomy kit for large ag tractors, as well as expanded capabilities for its 9RX, a high-horsepower, autonomous tillage tractor. The autonomous kit is a 16-camera array Halo system that pops on top of the cab and provides 360-degree visibility.

“Someone should not have to buy a new tractor to experience autonomy,” said Willy Pell, CEO of Blue River Technology, which partners with Deere to create new technologies.

Watch it in action:

The camera array works to provide better depth perception during operation. While traditional stereo cameras have double overlap of imagery, the camera array has triple overlap, Pell said.

“Each of these cameras can kind of waggle relative to each other and can all correct each other,” he said. “So we get these incredibly accurate depth maps at very large range, with a mechanically lightweight, no moving parts, cost-effective solution.”

Pell said he had recently visited a farmer with 300 acres in Illinois who was able to shorten her tillage work by two weeks using autonomous technology.

“Farmers always want to go faster; their back is always going to be against the wall with harvest,” he said. “We were just up in Illinois yesterday with the grower, and she was so excited that autonomy had basically pulled her season in by two weeks. And she's like, ‘Usually, I would have to finish harvest, and then I would have to go and till all these fields, and I'd be running up against the ground rules.’ Right? She's like, ‘Maybe I'd get it done. Maybe I wouldn't.’ She's like, ‘I've never been this far ahead of tillage, ever.’ And so farmers will always want to go faster. They will always want to pull wider pieces of equipment and get that scale and get that speed to get the job done quickly. And so what these camera arrays give us is this ability to see really far to cover lots of wide implements and to be easily retrofitted.”

The latest upgrades have led to a 40% speed increase since the last technological iteration, operating at 12 mph, he said. The system uses two hardened Nvidia Jetson GPUs devices that power decision logic and they can operate in extreme temperatures and climates, from -40 °F to extremely high temperatures, while handling shock and vibration. For connectivity, the AutoTrac navigation system uses GPS, StarFire guidance and other tools.

The autonomous tractors use the John Deere Operations Center interface to connect the machine to the operator and to the cloud. It tracks and analyzes data from the equipment. Farmers log on to the operations center and create work plans based on tasks that need to be completed in the field.

“(There’s) a monitor and analyze step at the end, where we look at the data that came back, see which parts of the field were productive, which parts weren’t and make some decisions there,” said Jeff Runde, autonomy technical delivery manager at Deere.

The most important part is the equipment autonomy step, which comes after planning and before the data is processed.

“The work plan is pushed to the machine and that’s the bulk of the tech stack that we’ve had for 20 years – AutoTrac – kicks in; that’s where we have StarFire, the equipment, our navigation computer,” Runde said.

Aaron Wells, director of engineering and autonomy at Blue River Technology, talks about the camera array technology in Deere's 9RX.Gigi Wood

Perception safeguarding is another component of the tractor’s autonomous system. An open corn or soybean field before planting and after harvest provides a wide-open space, which dictates the technology needed for connectivity. When tilling, there are many different implements that can be used with a tractor, and each one presents a slightly different use case, said Aaron Wells, director of engineering and autonomy at Blue River Technology.

“When we thought about the second-generation perception system, we needed a very wide field of view to be able to see and to do all these different jobs that look so different in some cases,” he said. “The vehicle is constantly seeing and evaluating its surroundings, it’s identifying things that it’s safe to drive over and things it has questions about. If there’s a question, something that the vehicle maybe isn’t sure if it’s safe or not, it will pause, it will send that image off board, to a teleoperation (remote) system in real time.”

From there, the farmer or operator decides whether it is safe to continue. The vehicle’s decision to pause for foreign objects in the field is based on calculations made by the GPU. When connectivity becomes a problem in rural areas or if a cell phone tower is not operating, the autonomous vehicles use layers of technology to stay connected, like Starlink. GPS is used to position the vehicle in the field, but is not used to for perception safeguarding, which works to keep humans safe in an autonomous environment.

The 9RX.John Deere

Expansion of Autonomy to Other Machines

The company is expecting limited release of these products in 2025, with full production possible in 2026. By 2030, Deere plans to provide a fully autonomous farm production system. So far, the tractors being tested in the field have farmed more than 50,000 acres autonomously, and Deere is gathering feedback from these pilot programs to improve the technology.

Large ag models from year 2025 and newer are autonomy ready. Older models can be made autonomy-ready with the help of Deere dealerships. Kits will be available for retrofitting on models going back to 2020. Availability with models older than 2020 will depend on market demand.

Deere is planning on expanding its autonomous technology to additional machines and implements in the future and is developing strategies for compatibility with non-Deere systems.

“People are excited about it. People are excited about what autonomy can bring to the farm,” Hindman said. “It's difficult for customers in these industries to find, attract and retain the talent that they need to do the work that is required of them in their in their individual businesses.”