People in Ag love to say that they “built the first self driving vehicles”. The auto steers were cutting edge and have been around since the 80s. Those cabs are also air conditioned and usually have a nice comfy leather seat. Once it’s all dialed in it’s monitoring the screens and browsing HN. A lot of you could be farmers!! /s
Anecdotal - a friend of mine still farms full time. He row crops in the midwest US. One of his fields butts up against the local small town. Last year, on the north side of the field, the rows are arrow straight. The south side were squirrely and curved all over compared to them.
When I asked what the hell happened, he said the auto-steer went out, and by the time he figured out how to even run the planter while it was planting, he was done.
He laughed and said that the biggest problem wasn't the loss in yield, it was that he dropped his psp and broke it.
My old timer story: I worked for TRW Space Electronics Group a long time ago. TRW Automotive was a distant division. They wanted a high tech gadget for tractors. So they came to my department. They needed a true ground speed sensor because the amount of tire slip has a huge impact on fuel economy when plowing fields, and manually controlling throttle to achieve optimal slip isn't reliable. We developed a gadget that used doppler radar and some digital signal processing. Output signal fed into throttle control. Seemed amazingly high tech for tractors at the time which was more than 20 years ago.
Worked my way through college in Ag during 70's and early 80's, before self driving anything. I can tell you from experience it's easy to be lulled into a sense of complacency by the boredom. I'm sure the human is still there because things can go wrong in a hurry, and when they do go wrong with a piece of equipment that powerful they go wrong in a big way.
Hah, yup, one minute everything's fine and the next minute your combine is jammed, a belt starts slipping, and then it all catches fire.
At least some of this fancy automation stuff helps catch problems like that before they get out of hand; now you just need a John Deere licensed technician to make a service call and reset the fault lockout...
How did they solve this for the aviation industry? IIRC they've had autopilot for decades as well. The aviation industry seems (appearances anyway) a lot more diligent and disciplined for things like that, I mean for one they have at least two pilots to monitor things.
Depends in the RV and the tractor. Just like every other piece of commercial equipment the price is partly a reflection of how much money the manufacturer expects you to make with it.
