Cnh Industries has been active in the agricultural machinery sector for 180 years, but its offer has evolved to bring real autonomous robots to the fields. During the Tech Day held in Phoenix, Arizona, he presented various innovations, but above all he gave a vision of how farms and the agricultural world in general are evolving. The first trend concerns tools for precision agriculture, in order to optimize consumption and resources as much as possible and transform every saving into profit.
Tractors, ploughs, threshers and balers today are stuffed with sensors and actuators that allow complete control of what is happening and how to act to the centimetre. Tractors are now self-driving and follow the instructions coming from a software that prepares the path to follow in the field, while on-board sensors allow obstacles to be avoided by blocking the machine’s operation or avoiding the obstacle.
If it is true that there is no traffic in the fields, the hypothesis of animals wandering where they shouldn’t or human beings who intervene for extraordinary situations should not be underestimated. The autonomy of the machine saves hours/man that would otherwise be involved in work with very low added value, but also allows optimizing the passages on the field thanks to a positioning system that uses GPS for the rough position and Rtk for that of precision, reaching the point of moving the tractor with an accuracy of less than two centimetres.
Just not applying fertilizer to previously sprayed areas saves hundreds of dollars per acre per year. But more can be done.
Cloud, machine learning e muggiti
CNH Industries has set up its machines to work connected to a platform that continuously detects their position and operations. In this way, the various machines in action can be coordinated to achieve maximum efficiency. A fertilizer spreading machine, for example, can act in such a way as to release the liquid exclusively near the plant thanks to a system of computer vision which recognizes what passes under the tractor, while the central coordination system keeps track of where the field has already been sprayed.