Autonomous mobility for large tractors

We focus on the evolution of tractor technologies towards fully navigational autonomy. This is the second article in the series on agricultural robots. It paints a picture of the industry in which autonomous tractors are launched, and shows how the technology is likely to evolve from tractor guidance to autosteer to manned but fully autonomous and finally to unmanned and fully autonomous. We further consider how farmer conservatism can turn these revolutionary technologies into evolutionary ones, and how taking the driver out of the equation can upend the long-held notion that big is better in agricultural machinery, potentially disturbing the agricultural machinery market by enabling the use of swarms of small, slow-moving and low-cost autonomous agricultural robots.