While I certainly agree that self-driving farm equipment is revolutionary, I'd argue that Google's technological advances are in the field of being able to understand how to drive on a road which marked for humans to drive on, and which is simultaneously in use by human drivers as well.
I'm sure that there are problems and issues which arise from navigating a field and manipulating whatever equipment you've got for whatever task you're working on that I'm just not fully appreciating. However, I really question if that task is anywhere near as complex as safely navigating traffic while obeying all the laws of the road when you can't even be sure of the state of the road you'll be travelling on.
It's just a totally different problem being solved. This is apples and oranges.
I agree. A farm is a type of factory, and thus has fairly controlled conditions compared to a public thoroughfare. Any number of solutions could work for a farm that would be untenable for self driving cars, such as marking the expected area with sensors to define the working area, outlining the area on a GPS map, running the equipment over the area one or more times to teach it, etc. None of these work as a general purpose solution to a self driving car, and they might not even be progenitors to the self driving technology we end up with.
A solution to a highly constrained version of a problem may not be applicable to the general purpose problem in any way.
Edit: mean to say "may not be applicable" in last sentence.
Yeah, agreed. The overlap technologies of position fixing and mechanical control have actually been solved for a long time now. The current interest in self-driving vehicles is based on advances in sensors and processing to detect environmental conditions and hazards on roadways and in places where people commonly drive cars.
I think you're correct. I can vividly remember a local news story from at least 15 years ago that talked about self-driving cars being just around the corner. All it would take is putting sensors in every roadway and having dedicated lanes for them. I was pretty young and excitable, and I could not figure out why we weren't putting those sensors in as roads were replaced around the city. Google requires none of that insane retrofitting, and is therefore much more likely to be useful.
In a somewhat tangentially related vein, Suncor Energy, one of the top Oil Sands mining companies in Canada, announced they're replacing their fleet of heavy haul trucks with automated ones[0] by 2020, in the artcle they interview a automated truck industry rep who basically calls the use-case 'simple':
>"Really, what the industry is doing here is picking the low-hanging fruit. It's a lot easier to design and operate an autonomous truck on private property like the oil sands than it is on a on a public road. And there are a number of motivations. Computers drive better and more safely and better than humans."
Exactly. Self steering sailboats existed before self driving tractors, but again... keeping a sailboat on a specific bearing is far easier than turning a tractor with any number of attachments towing behind it. Nobody came along and said what Deere did with tractors wasn't original because sailboats could auto steer. What about autopilot on airplanes? The comparisons are endless.
It's an interesting article on its own, but any claim to inventing self driving cars on the farm is rather shortsighted... every invention borrows from the past and contributes to the future. The same is true for art, literature, industrial design, cooking, medicine, and almost any other creation.
Lets not discount the invention of the self driving tractor, but lets also not discount the leaps that have been made since then in AI and computer learning for understanding road markers, traffic behavior, traffic signals, routing, crash avoidance, parking assistance, etc.
There's something to be said for starting with a simplified version of a complex problem. Driving on a road vs. a field is apple and oranges, but I'm sure it was a useful starting point for building road vehicles.
This smacks of "Apple didn't invent tablets, Microsoft did!!" kind of thinking.
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.
Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.
DARPA jump-started the industry with their three autonomous vehicle competitions a decade ago. Most of the entrants were university mechanical engineering departments. No one came close to completing the first challenge. But they got pretty good by the third one. Google and the auto indutry continued funding thereafter.
The DARPA grand challenge was certainly a pivotal event, but I wouldn't say it jump-started the industry. The two biggest teams in the second race, from CMU and Stanford, were both spinoffs of the Field Robotics Center at CMU, which had been doing this for a long time:
John Deere does not receive any credit for any innovations they may have made in the area of self driving vehicles until they acknowledge the right of vehicle owners to service their own machines and release all required documentation, source code, and diagnostic tools to facilitate this.
I understand where you're coming from and I think there is a middle ground, but there is certainly a decent rationale for locking it down: these machines cost $750K to $1M and enormously complex. Allowing an owner to inject some jury rigged code could cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the machine, or worse yet hurt or kill someone.
Honestly, what would happen if the implements you have hitched to the back of the tractor can't receive the proper instructions because the owner bought some counterfeit FTDI chip. You can set up your spray zones to make sure you don't spray pesticides near waterways, who is liable if that gets screwed up? The counterfeiter? The Farmer? Either way you know John Deere is going to get dragged through the mud for it.
How do we make this ideal compatible with the often-stated claim that, for insurance and legal purposes, the manufacturer should be liable for the vehicle? A car you can service only at the cost of losing your insurance and legal protection is practically a non-serviceable car.
Daimler is also doing quite a bit with self driving trucks. I'd guess they have to be a leader in that domain.
Admittedly they weren't really on my radar until the recent news about their tests in Nevada.
From a layman perspective, it sounds much easier to automate a vehicle moving in a field, where you have a low chance of hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist.
It is, although there are issues that self-driving cars don't have to deal with, like muddy conditions on hills, lining up rows (tricky on head rows), speed-matching during picker unloading (e.g., tractor and truck working together to evenly-distribute the unload), etc.
On the other hand, roads are designed for cars. In fields, it's hard for a computer vision system to distinguish between a thicket of brown grass (can easily drive over) or a pipe (will damage you if you try to drive over.) They're different problems, I don't think one is obviously easier than the other. And there are certainly people in fields.
Driving a car is a social exercise. The challenge is making something navigate through human chaos, not make it move.
Even the article itself hints that comparing the two is kind of stupid: "[...]where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way." and then immediately proceeds laughing at the general population ignorance because farmers did it first.
I remember when I was a child, my father explained to me that depressing the right pedal makes the car go forward, the left one makes it stop and this round thing makes it turn. "WOW! Easy!" I exclaimed, "I know to drive now!" Yeah right.
Elevators are automated. Subways are automated. Even mother fucking planes can fly and land themselves (with the right equipment). Yup those giant flying monsters containing hundreds of human souls got automated before our cars.
But wait, Google is stupid because it didn't do it first.
How about we all just agree this is a click-bait article and we've all gone chomp on the hook.
I don't want to write 'who cares' but realistically neither John Deer or Google did. There were gifted individuals at both companies who wrote the code and developed the hardware and one day someone will write a book and it might be an interesting read.
To argue for JD or Google is just playing into the marketers hands.
I think a lot of the commenters here are correct in pointing out that the problem John Deere have solved is very different from the problem that Google, Tesla, Uber are trying to solve.
That said, I think there is a "human acceptance" piece necessary for autonomous vehicles to be allowed on roads. A lot of people are going to fear, dislike, or be otherwise opposed to sharing the road with autonomous vehicles. A lot of people simply don't believe that it is possible for an autonomous vehicle to handle certain driving situations. To be able to point to tractors driving themselves around fields for the past X years is valuable in getting humans to accept robotic cars.
It's useful but I guess people will just raise that same reservation - just because they work in the field...blah blah blah.
My guess is that insurance will force people's hands in the switch. Most accidents on the road are due to human error (I assume, or rather had there not been human involvement the situation could have been avoided). Let's assume that self driving technology reaches the safety level that most of us here believe it will. Insurers, hedging against risk will have to financially penalise manual driving, since it will carry a much higher risk.
Hopefully that takes the irrational opposition out of the equation and let's the raw statistics take charge :)
Self-driving tractors are incredibly dumb. They just follow a predefined path using GPS. Most don't even have any obstacle sensing. They probably should at least have a basic obstacle detection radar, but at present, they don't.
I saw the original John Deere differential GPS prototype tractor in use at Stanford many years ago. There used to be an empty field next to the Stanford horse barn where they tested. It's now a parking lot.
This article is giving credit to a market leader, but I'm pretty sure there were a number of GPS technology companies and precision ag startups that were working on automating farm equipment first. John Deere has many times been a late adopter in terms of technology, waiting to see what pans out in the market, then relying on the penetration of their dealer network to distribute proven technologies to a much wider audience.
Yes, this a ridiculous PR puff-piece. JD saw something coming and got into the business along with a bunch of other companies. There are a lot of competing GPS technology companies that make products just as good if not better and sell well in the absence of the advantages that JD had from the start.
Hemisphere GNSS, whose (Outback) products I use, has a superior product in my opinion and started a few years before Deere got interested in the business at all.
How about no.... Driving a tractor through a predetermined path in a predictable pattern is no where near the same as driving on our roads with human error and the like. Also I'm not about to get behind a company that won't let you service your own machinery.
Instead of self-driving cars, I'd say focus on eliminating the need for "going somewhere"/vehicles in general. Would be so cool if we could just 'beam' in to work. 3D virtual presence. But hey, its not my money they're investing.
You sure? Satloc was doing GPS guidance for aerial guidance for decades (crop dusting planes). They adapted it for ag guidance in the 1990s I believe. This technology has been evolving for years and saying that John Deere or some single company invented it sounds like a gross oversimplification.
"Apple didn't lead the mobile device revolution. Blackberry did."
Technologies succeeding in the gauntlet of consumer electronics makes a bigger splash in public media---for obvious reasons---than those same technologies applied to the problems of specific trades.
Not actually. John Deer doest not build vehicles, he builds machinery.
John Deer machines work in a strict set of environments, and although they may be very sophisticated and react to a range of adverse situations, these situations are still much more predictable and the route much better known in advance than roads and streets.
If the autonomous vehicle problem were dealing with different roads, pavements and other pre-programmed vehicles, the self driving car would be a thing from the 80s, together with the robot car welder.
Will someone who works at Amazon and reads HN please ask Jeff Bezos to tell the Washington Post to grow out of this smartass fake journalism? Most people are well aware that agribusiness depends heavily on automation. Most people are equally well aware that it's a lot easier to drive around a field when you are the only thing in it than to drive on a public road. That's why you only need a driving license for the latter case.
The entire article is one giant straw man fallacy.
> Most people are well aware that agribusiness depends heavily on automation.
While it doesn't necessarily invalidate your criticism, this couldn't be less true. Most people in the Washington Post's reader base have exactly zero awareness of agriculture, full stop. Food comes in a box they buy at the supermarket, and that's the extent of their knowledge. If they have any thoughts beyond that, it's probably either an understanding of farming they got from a quaint children's book, or some kind of poorly-reasoned Monsanto/GMO FUD they heard at a fashionable dinner party. The idea that they know what kind of ag equipment is on the market, what it does, how it works, or what it costs is ludicrous.
Last time I checked I didn't see any farming in my local main street. Not sure to what extent technology from John Deere can be used for public vehicle. May be not much.
What's especially laughable is the article's mention of robotic lawn mowers. I happen to have bought one today, and those things (although admittedly there are models that are more intelligent) just ride around randomly until they hit a hard object or the perimeter, which is signaled by a wire that is dug into the ground. An 'autonomous vehicle' this is not (or only for the most basic definition of the concept).
[+] [-] da_chicken|10 years ago|reply
I'm sure that there are problems and issues which arise from navigating a field and manipulating whatever equipment you've got for whatever task you're working on that I'm just not fully appreciating. However, I really question if that task is anywhere near as complex as safely navigating traffic while obeying all the laws of the road when you can't even be sure of the state of the road you'll be travelling on.
It's just a totally different problem being solved. This is apples and oranges.
[+] [-] kbenson|10 years ago|reply
A solution to a highly constrained version of a problem may not be applicable to the general purpose problem in any way.
Edit: mean to say "may not be applicable" in last sentence.
[+] [-] markbnj|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonlucc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awor|10 years ago|reply
>"Really, what the industry is doing here is picking the low-hanging fruit. It's a lot easier to design and operate an autonomous truck on private property like the oil sands than it is on a on a public road. And there are a number of motivations. Computers drive better and more safely and better than humans."
[0] http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day6/episode-238-charleston-s-ame-ch...
[+] [-] bonestamp2|10 years ago|reply
It's an interesting article on its own, but any claim to inventing self driving cars on the farm is rather shortsighted... every invention borrows from the past and contributes to the future. The same is true for art, literature, industrial design, cooking, medicine, and almost any other creation.
Lets not discount the invention of the self driving tractor, but lets also not discount the leaps that have been made since then in AI and computer learning for understanding road markers, traffic behavior, traffic signals, routing, crash avoidance, parking assistance, etc.
[+] [-] navait|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ytdht|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awor|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] higherpurpose|10 years ago|reply
Who cares who invented it, especially if they were incapable of bringing the technology to the mass market themselves? The real heroes are those who make it useful for the mass market, not those who keep it on the 8th shelf in their "R&D Lab" or even those who manage to sell 10,000 units a year globally.
Also, as you say, there's a big difference between "self-driving farm vehicles" and self-driving road cars, just like there' a big difference between an unusable 2h battery life and $2000 XP "tablet" from the 2000 compared to the 2010 iPad. In other words, there was been a lot more "invention" added to the iPad since the Microsoft tablets appeared as well.
[+] [-] peter303|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martincmartin|10 years ago|reply
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tjochem/nhaa/Journal.html http://www.pbs.org/saf/transcripts/transcript705.htm
Disclosure: I was a grad student at CMU at the time, in the building, and saw a lot of this up close.
[+] [-] gnu8|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codezero|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viggity|10 years ago|reply
Honestly, what would happen if the implements you have hitched to the back of the tractor can't receive the proper instructions because the owner bought some counterfeit FTDI chip. You can set up your spray zones to make sure you don't spray pesticides near waterways, who is liable if that gets screwed up? The counterfeiter? The Farmer? Either way you know John Deere is going to get dragged through the mud for it.
[+] [-] davelnewton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fluidcruft|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tgb|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david_b|10 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
Google has obviously taken taken that a lot further (no driver reacting every 9km)
> "We kind of laugh when we see news stories about self-driving cars, because we've had that for years," Poole said.
Yup, no wonder he is a farmer (to be fair: if you're running a tractor at 2 am you may well imagine there to be heavy traffic on the field...).
[+] [-] kriro|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seren|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsbechtel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davelnewton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] martincmartin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Coincoin|10 years ago|reply
Even the article itself hints that comparing the two is kind of stupid: "[...]where there are few pesky pedestrians or federal rules to get in the way." and then immediately proceeds laughing at the general population ignorance because farmers did it first.
I remember when I was a child, my father explained to me that depressing the right pedal makes the car go forward, the left one makes it stop and this round thing makes it turn. "WOW! Easy!" I exclaimed, "I know to drive now!" Yeah right.
Elevators are automated. Subways are automated. Even mother fucking planes can fly and land themselves (with the right equipment). Yup those giant flying monsters containing hundreds of human souls got automated before our cars.
But wait, Google is stupid because it didn't do it first.
EDIT: missing sentence
[+] [-] adaml_623|10 years ago|reply
I don't want to write 'who cares' but realistically neither John Deer or Google did. There were gifted individuals at both companies who wrote the code and developed the hardware and one day someone will write a book and it might be an interesting read.
To argue for JD or Google is just playing into the marketers hands.
/rant
[+] [-] jfoster|10 years ago|reply
That said, I think there is a "human acceptance" piece necessary for autonomous vehicles to be allowed on roads. A lot of people are going to fear, dislike, or be otherwise opposed to sharing the road with autonomous vehicles. A lot of people simply don't believe that it is possible for an autonomous vehicle to handle certain driving situations. To be able to point to tractors driving themselves around fields for the past X years is valuable in getting humans to accept robotic cars.
[+] [-] aidos|10 years ago|reply
My guess is that insurance will force people's hands in the switch. Most accidents on the road are due to human error (I assume, or rather had there not been human involvement the situation could have been avoided). Let's assume that self driving technology reaches the safety level that most of us here believe it will. Insurers, hedging against risk will have to financially penalise manual driving, since it will carry a much higher risk.
Hopefully that takes the irrational opposition out of the equation and let's the raw statistics take charge :)
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
I saw the original John Deere differential GPS prototype tractor in use at Stanford many years ago. There used to be an empty field next to the Stanford horse barn where they tested. It's now a parking lot.
[+] [-] bsbechtel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JamisonM|10 years ago|reply
Hemisphere GNSS, whose (Outback) products I use, has a superior product in my opinion and started a few years before Deere got interested in the business at all.
[+] [-] joshstrange|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ksk|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dm2|10 years ago|reply
http://www.asirobots.com/news/
http://www.asirobots.com/farming/
http://www.asirobots.com/products/mobius/
[+] [-] mojoB|10 years ago|reply
> The Beeline Navigator was developed in 1993 by Australian engineer, Rob Mailer. [1]
[1] http://www.queenslandcountrylife.com.au/news/agriculture/mac...
[+] [-] nas|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raldi|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fixermark|10 years ago|reply
"Apple didn't lead the mobile device revolution. Blackberry did."
Technologies succeeding in the gauntlet of consumer electronics makes a bigger splash in public media---for obvious reasons---than those same technologies applied to the problems of specific trades.
[+] [-] vmorgulis|10 years ago|reply
https://stellarsupport.deere.com/en_US/support/pdf/om/en/PFP...
You can record a map with the GPS and replay it. It's a little bit like waypoints for drones.
There are other companies that make driverless tractors:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_tractor
It also reminds me the machines in Interstellar (the indian drone that can fly 10 years and the tractor).
[+] [-] aylons|10 years ago|reply
John Deer machines work in a strict set of environments, and although they may be very sophisticated and react to a range of adverse situations, these situations are still much more predictable and the route much better known in advance than roads and streets.
If the autonomous vehicle problem were dealing with different roads, pavements and other pre-programmed vehicles, the self driving car would be a thing from the 80s, together with the robot car welder.
[+] [-] anigbrowl|10 years ago|reply
The entire article is one giant straw man fallacy.
[+] [-] fredkbloggs|10 years ago|reply
While it doesn't necessarily invalidate your criticism, this couldn't be less true. Most people in the Washington Post's reader base have exactly zero awareness of agriculture, full stop. Food comes in a box they buy at the supermarket, and that's the extent of their knowledge. If they have any thoughts beyond that, it's probably either an understanding of farming they got from a quaint children's book, or some kind of poorly-reasoned Monsanto/GMO FUD they heard at a fashionable dinner party. The idea that they know what kind of ag equipment is on the market, what it does, how it works, or what it costs is ludicrous.
[+] [-] dj_doh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roel_v|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasfoster96|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|10 years ago|reply