Killarney farmer builds driverless tractor

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This article was published 23/01/2016 (3748 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon — The seminar theatre at Manitoba Ag Days last Wednesday was packed with hundreds of people. But the audience was so intent on what agriculture’s latest whiz kid was trying to show them, someone passing by in the concourse above might have mistaken it for empty.

Matthew Reimer was punching code into a computer program — a process about as exciting as watching paint dry — while people watched intently on the overhead screen. Suddenly, an extendable post with a hat on top several metres away from him, started to rise — like magic — and the audience broke into applause.

Except it wasn’t magic. Reimer, a 29-year-old farmer from Killarney, was demonstrating the gist of an easily accessible computer program he used to turn his tractor into a hired hand during harvest.

Reimer, who dropped out of engineering school because he decided he’d really rather farm, set out about this time last year to build what machinery manufacturers have been promising for decades — a driverless tractor. By harvest time, he’d done it.

From his cab in the combine, he can push a button that causes a tractor towing a grain cart parked on the other side of the field to come across the field and pull alongside the moving combine so he can empty the hopper into the grain cart. Once that is completed, the tractor pulls away, turns around and parks, waiting for its next load.

He makes it sound so simple, starting with the fact all of the hardware and software, except for his reprogramming efforts, are open source and readily available. He learned what he needed to know about computer programming through a free online course.

“It’s an auto pilot out of a remote-control drone, and I just adapted it to my tractor, and then I wrote some software that runs on the combine that is software that made sense for a farm,” he said in an interview after winning the top prize in the annual inventor’s showcase competition at the three-day show.

Reimer said he made a few mistakes along the way, which drove up his research and development costs to around $8,000. He figures the system would cost someone else about $5,000 to build themselves. Plus, he warns, it takes a lot of hours to install into a tractor, a process he anticipates many farmers will be more than willing to pay him to do.

He plans to charge about $35,000, roughly the equivalent of a hired hand’s salary, to help farmers get their own driverless tractor ready to roll.

“The big value is that at harvest time, it’s super hard to find somebody to help, so now there is one less person you have to find at harvest,” he said. His human hired hand, who is a trained mechanic, is now able to focus on keeping the farm’s machinery humming instead of sitting in a tractor waiting for the next load.

“On our farm, no one lost their job; we just redeployed the labour,” Reimer said.

Farmers have long known major equipment manufacturers have invested in developing similar technology, but their efforts have yet to come to market.

‘It’s an auto pilot out of a remote-control drone, and I just adapted it to my tractor, and then I wrote some software that runs on the combine that is software that made sense for a farm’

“They’ve spent a lot of money developing that and I kind of,” he paused, “haven’t. But they are worried about the liability,” he said.

For Reimer, it’s less about liability than it is about safety for the people working with equipment on the farm, including his own family. He has designed his system to have multiple features that warn anyone around the tractor it is about to move, and which allow its remote master to shut it down. The system is designed to operate within full view of the remote controller.

He has no intention of slapping a patent on his share of the innovation either. He’d rather see farmers using it, or better yet, building their own. “I am way more excited about that,” he told his audience. “This is a ridiculous amount of fun.”

 

Laura Rance is editor of the Manitoba Co-operator. She can be reached at laura@fbcpublishing.com or 204-792-4382