John Deere revealed several new autonomous machines during a press conference at CES 2025 to support customers in agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping. Building on Deere’s autonomous technology first revealed at CES 2022, the company’s second-generation autonomy kit combines advanced computer vision, AI and cameras to help the machines navigate their environments.
While each of these industries experiences their own set of challenges, a commonality across all is skilled labor availability.
- Agriculture: the American Farm Bureau Federation also estimates there are roughly 2.4 million farm jobs that need to be filled annually.
- Construction: 88% of contractors struggle to find skilled labor.
- Commercial Landscaping: 86% of landscaping business owners can’t find labor to fill open positions.
“Our agriculture, construction and commercial landscaping customers all have work that must get done at certain times of the day and year, yet there is not enough available and skilled labor to do the work,” said Jahmy Hindman, chief technology officer at John Deere. “Autonomy can help address this challenge. That’s why we’re extending our technology stack to enable more machines to operate safely and autonomously in unique and complex environments. This will not only benefit our customers, but all of us who rely on them to provide the food, fuel, fiber, infrastructure, and landscaping care that we depend on every day.”
One of the machines shown was the 460 P-Tier Autonomous Articulated Dump Truck (ADT) for quarry operations. It’s a complex process to mine, process and transport materials. Using the second-generation kit, the ADT will handle the repetitive tasks of transporting material around the quarry to facilitate different steps in the cycle.
Select machines will be autonomy-ready from the factory and the second-generation perception system will be available as a retrofit kit for certain existing machines, providing customers with multiple paths to adoption based on where they are in their technology journey.
The machines are managed via John Deere Operations Center Mobile, the company’s cloud-based platform. By swiping left to right to start, the machine can be started once placed in the appropriate spot.
Through the app, users also have access to live video, images, data and metrics, and the ability to adjust various factors like speed. In the event of any job quality anomalies or machine health issues, users will be notified remotely so they can make necessary adjustments.
Deere & Company, www.deere.com/en/news