[robbiep]

My family run John Deeres with Starfire and greenstar. With our neighbours we have several RTK stations to get centimetre accuracy.

When we got our first auto-steer in 2001 it changed my school holidays.. Instead of having to drive mind numbingly slowly I was able to read books, and then progressively shift onto movies etc with the first video iPods etc. awesome. Huge increases in productivity and reduced inputs.

On the other hand, our neighbours who have often got seasonal workers to drive tractors have lost several tractors due to the workers not paying attention and running into power poles etc.

I have heard that the biggest obstacle to self driving machines has been the legal implications of having a tractor with no driver. It would be great to overcome this but there's still a way to go because at the moment no system I have seen can handle obstacles, specially if they haven't been programmed in (at the moment you can place a mark near trees, and it will beep when you near the end of your run to alert you to turn around) - also each implement requires very précise monitoring that may change markedly in the same field depending on the conditions in terms of ground speed, implement height and a host of other factors.

Awesome technology