How NASA and John Deere Helped Tractors Drive Themselves

There has been a lot of talk lately of self-driving cars, but farmers have already been making good use of self-driving tractors for more than a decade—in part due to a partnership between John Deere and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on global positioning system receivers.The story, featured in the latest issue of NASA Spinoff, coming out Dec. 5, starts with GPS - technology that was still new in the mid-1990s when John Deere, based in Moline, Illinois, began using it for precision agriculture. The company combined GPS location data with readings from sensors on a harvesting combine to determine the crop yield on different parts of the field.Such information can help farmers allocate future resources and determine which seed varieties and management practices are the most productive.