Yes, you can build your own autonomous tractor

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Many situations have two scenarios: one where a problem is looking for a technology, or the other where technology exists and is looking for a problem to solve.

In the case of farming, often it’s the problem that comes first, but when it comes to autonomy, the technology has been leaps and bounds ahead of the practical applications…until now.

Brian Tischler, a grain farmer from Mannville, Alta., decided to use the hours spent in a tractor being driven by autosteer to write code to replace himself. “We were already half of the way (to autonomy),” Tischler says. His program simply went the rest of the way.

What makes Tishler’s set up unique isn’t only that it’s farmer designed and farmer made, the self-driving application is open-source-software based, a knowledge sharing concept that’s quite rare in farming applications.

Shaun Haney caught up with Tischler at the Lacombe location of CanolaPalooza to talk about the concept of build-it-yourself autonomous units, open source software, and more. Watch below for footage of the unit as well.

Check out more footage of the AgraBot running at CanolaPalooza:

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