Auto-steering extended to headlands

Manually steering a tractor and implement through a headland turn, while watching for obstacles, raising the implement, and down-shifting the tractor, makes for tiring work — and headland inconsistencies, for example in seed drilling.

Automatic headland management has now been added by John Deere to their GPS auto-steering facilities.

And their iTEC AutoLearn has won one of the prestigious silver medals for innovation at Germany’s Agritechnica trade fair, where judges described it as the world’s first auto-teaching tractor.

Programming headland turn sequences into auto-steering systems requires navigation of the software menu, which is often a challenge for uninitiated operators, said innovation judges at Agritechnica. They will be helped by iTEC AutoLearn, which detects any headland sequence repeated three times, and prompts the driver to automate it.

iTEC AutoLearn then automatically guides the tractor through end-of-row functions at the appropriate times.

The driver can pay more attention to the tractor and implement, and watch for damaging obstacles.