9/25/2019 Emily Jankauski
Written by Emily Jankauski
John Deere
Perhaps the most exciting element of autonomous vehicles for Christopher Myers, vice president of John Deere’s Tractor Platform Engineering, are their ability to do “more with less,” he said.
“That’s what excites us, and that’s what excites our customers . . . is to see the reality.”
John Reid’s, director of John Deere’s Product Technology and Innovation, light-bulb moment all came down to thinking about how agricultural equipment could be a part of I-ACT’s research efforts.
“The idea of being able to have a test-validation, verification facility for the entire ecosystem is also very interesting from an autonomous vehicle perspective,” he said.
The concept of automation isn’t necessarily new for the agricultural leader. In fact, they’ve been producing automatic guidance products for the last 20 years, such as tractors navigating themselves the in fields with little human interaction.
But Reid sees a real difference between automatic guidance and autonomous vehicles.
“There’s a real difference between the on-road productions, you know driving the car, to off-road,” Reid said.
As for the future of autonomy and John Deere? Well, that’s something Reid foresees an exciting prospect.
“I still feel like we have a lot of opportunity to help our customers with automation,” he said, “(but) at the same time, autonomy is something we’ve been used to making products to where we just design it and sell it. And autonomy, it’s not going to happen that way. We’re going to have to pilot it.”
What a better place to test such equipment than with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s autonomous track?
That’s something where Reid sees great potential.
“Having a facility that can address the longer-term problems is very interesting,” he said.
“It has to be built in a way that looks at broad problems versus the specific needs of every individual company,” Reid added. “If you’re going to have something that lasts overtime, then it has to have the ability to address the bigger challenges. I see a lot of elements of that here.”