Smart Implements
Tim Hammerich
News Reporter
Automation in agriculture usually causes people to picture driverless tractors roaming around in large fields taking over the tasks that humans used to do. But a lot of the value of automation can be realized with more efficient and dynamic smart implements. AgTonomy’s Tim Bucher says there is a tremendous amount of untapped potential in apply this technology to the vast amount of farm implements out there.
Bucher… “ You don't drive a tractor from point A to point B, you do work while you're doing that. And so bringing the implements into the picture is really important. So we can actually sense the engine load. And when the engine load, we know we're on flat land or a hillside. because we have inertial measurement units, these sensors that can measure what angle the vehicle is at. We can see that, oh, we're on a flat land, but all of a sudden the engine load got heavier and we know where mowing. So that must mean like we're in thicker grass, or cover crop, whatever you're doing. If you were just going six miles an hour, the tractor would bog down, or worse yet, you would do a really bad job of mowing. So we dynamically modulate the speed, the RPM of the implement and basically do it like a human would do it. So you can't just look at the tractor, you have to look at the whole ecosystem.”
Bucher said AgTonomy technology has already been applied to 110 implements and counting.
