| | March 20208CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONCHALLENGES IN OFF-ROAD VEHICLE AUTONOMYBy Steve Caudill, Director, Agriculture Sector, Digital Operations, CNH Industrial [BIT: CNHI]As an agriculture platform manager for CNH Industrial's connected vehicle FARM/FLEET products, I'm responsible to deliver off-vehicle software solutions to our dealers and growers that help them manage their operations. For many years, the agricultural fleet has been capable of autonomous--but attended--operation. Tractors and implements outfitted with precision guidance systems operate from prescriptions that describe exactly what the machinery should do with as much as sub-inch/centimeter precision. The vehicle operator need only line the vehicle up with a guidance line on the map, start the task and the vehicle will run the prescription without any intervention.This hands-free version of vehicle autonomy has been available in the marketplace since the 1990's and has steadily improved in accuracy, ease of use, and capability such that very complex sets of turns, planting depths, speeds, spraying coverage, and other task particulars are available as fully automated features. In fact, they are handled so smoothly by the equipment that when examining a field, a seasoned observer can tell exactly where an operator took the wheel or pressed the accelerator instead of letting the vehicle control the operation.I'm frequently asked why, if this level of control is available, most of the equipment they see in the field still has an operator. Of the wide range of reasons, two stand out as both quite difficult to solve and as needing off-vehicle tools as part of the solution. They are the unanticipated and the disconnected.When setting up a field for a precision guidance prescription, the farm manager establishes field boundaries, notes obstacles, drainage, and other field characteristics that will aid in both optimizing the operation and avoiding trouble. A well-done field setup allows vehicles pulling different implements or doing different tasks to avoid obstructions or account for variation in soil, terrain and moisture across a field. A fully autonomous and unattended vehicle can execute the prescription without flaw and even account for conditions not specifically in the prescription. This means that variation like weather, tillage depth variation, crop growth variation, and other factors can be anticipated. What happens, however, when your unattended planter encounters an
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