Autonomous Tractor: From Plough Horses to ABB Robots

An autonomous tractor works a field on its own. It follows a planned path and watches for obstacles, stopping when something is in the way, while a person supervises from a phone or a control station. This post traces how farm power moved from horse teams to the first gasoline tractors, then through cable and wire guided experiments and satellite steering to the driverless machines from John Deere, Fendt, Kubota and AgXeed that are working or launching in 2026. ABB builds no tractors, so the post also looks at where its mobile robots and cobots run into the same problems on farms and in packhouses.

An AgXeed AgBot 5.115T2 robot tractor with an Amazone cultivator at the Öko-Feldtage field days, 2025. Photo: MarcelX42 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

From horse teams to wire guided tractors

Ploughs were traditionally pulled by oxen, and later by horses and mules. Steam came next, but in England the heavy, wet soil made the steam ploughing machines of firms such as Garrett less economical than a team of horses. Petrol engines did better. In 1892 John Froelich built a gasoline-powered tractor in Clayton County, Iowa, and after receiving a patent he started the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company. Henry Ford's mass-produced Fordson arrived in 1917, and by 1923 it had 77 percent of the US market. By the 1920s gasoline tractors were the norm, with a farmer in the seat.

An Amish farmer works a field behind a team of draft horses in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Waterloo company went on to build the popular Waterloo Boy tractor, and John Deere bought it in 1918. Deere still makes its 8R and 9R tractors in Waterloo, Iowa. Getting the farmer out of the seat took much longer. In 1940 Frank W. Andrew built a driverless tractor steered by a cable: it wound around a barrel or fixed wheel in the middle of the field and was attached to a steering arm on the front of the tractor. In the 1950s Ford developed a driverless tractor called "The Sniffer", but it never went into production, because it could not run without wire buried under the field.

A 1917 Waterloo Boy Model R from the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company of Waterloo, Iowa. Photo: H. Zell / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In 1994 engineers at the Silsoe Research Institute used a picture analysis system to guide a small driverless tractor through vegetable and root crops, and it could manage slight turns at the headland. Precision agriculture, a shift that began in the 1980s, gave farmers tractors they drove with the help of GPS devices and on-board computers. Around 2011 engineers worked on semi-automated tractors whose drivers only had to steer at the end of each row. The first driverless designs simply followed a lead tractor with a driver, which let one person do twice as much work, and later designs aimed at full autonomy.

Two autonomous compact tractors spraying in a Texas vineyard in 2012, both run from one command station. Photo: ASIrobots / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Driverless tractors at work in 2026

John Deere revealed its first fully autonomous tractor at CES in January 2022. Built on an 8R and pulling a chisel plow, it used GPS guidance and six pairs of stereo cameras for 360-degree obstacle detection, while a neural network classified each pixel in about 100 milliseconds to decide whether the machine kept moving or stopped. Other makers sell autonomy as a kit for a tractor. In October 2026 Fendt showed Ohio farmers on its Harvest Tour a tractor fitted with the PTx OutRun kit, which mounts on the cab roof and brings a grain cart to the combine when called from a phone or tablet. "It follows you around, just like a little puppy dog," farmer Jared Baudendistel told WDTN.

A Smart Ag autonomous tractor pulls a cart beside a sugar beet harvester at a demonstration in Frankenmuth, Michigan, 2019. Photo: Preston Keres / USDA via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

At FIRA USA in Yakima, Washington, Kubota and Agtonomy launched an autonomous version of Kubota's low-profile M5L tractor in October 2026. It is the third tractor Agtonomy has made driverless, after the Bobcat CT4045 and Kubota's M5N. Its sensors sit under the rollbar, with stereo cameras at the front, and it is meant for spraying, mowing and cultivation in orchards and nut groves, with deliveries from 2027. Farmtario reported on 5 October that AgXeed's AgBot is heading to Ontario. Not every start-up made it, though. Monarch Tractor of California raised more than $200 million, ran into financial and manufacturing problems, and in April 2026 its remaining assets and autonomous technology went to Caterpillar.

An AgXeed AgBot W4 2 Series robot tractor on show at Agritechnica 2025. Photo: MarcelX42 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

ABB's nearest product to a driverless tractor is the Flexley Mover P604, a mobile robot that works indoors. It finds its way with 3D Visual SLAM: each robot builds its own map, shares it with the rest of its fleet and positions itself to within 10 mm, with no extra infrastructure, a long way from the buried wire Ford's Sniffer needed. ABB offers it for intralogistics and kitting, where it lifts and moves loads alongside people. Moving crates, seed or feed around a farm warehouse the same way is a possible use, and the navigation problem is a smaller version of the one tractor makers face outdoors.

An ABB Flexley Mover P604, which maps its surroundings with 3D Visual SLAM, among wooden pallets. Photo: ABB

What autonomous tractors still need

In California, a Cal/OSHA rule whose current version dates to 1977 still requires moving, self-powered farm equipment to have a person at the controls. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers petitioned to change it in 2018, and Monarch received a temporary experimental variance in August 2021 so it could test driverless tractors. Stocktonia found no sign by September 2026 that the requirement had been amended. Jobs are part of the argument. United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta said that "any type of automation that takes away people's jobs" is bad unless other work is provided.

An AgXeed robot tractor among visitors at the Dyrskuet show in Aabenraa, 2025. Photo: Hjart / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Much of what these tractors help grow ends up in packhouses, and in one of them ABB robots already do a job that was done by hand. At OP Kiwi Sole, an Italian fruit cooperative, GoFa cobots guided by vision from Conkreta Robotics put the wax seal on each pear stem in about one second per fruit. Every stalk differs in length, shape and orientation, and production process manager Matteo Caravita said the cobots automated "a task once thought impossible". The team simulated the whole line in RobotStudio before building it. How the tractors themselves are built is covered in our post on tractor manufacturing.

A GoFa cobot over a tray of fruit on the waxing line at OP Kiwi Sole in Italy. Photo: ABB

On small farms, autonomy arrives as kits and compact machines like the Bobcat CT4045. WDTN noted the PTx OutRun system is not a cheap purchase, but Baudendistel said that "by the time you paid somebody full-time year-round, you about paid for the technology." Repair access is changing too: in July 2026 the Federal Trade Commission's lawsuit against Deere ended in a settlement that requires the company to make repair resources available to independent shops and owners. The average American farmer is 58, according to WDTN, and Future Farming reports that Kubota dealers will help growers fit the technology into their workflow. ABB has worked on simpler programming for its cobots: at OP Kiwi Sole a RAPID module built in RobotStudio lets the GoFa pick irregular objects without complex programming.

A GoFa cobot fitted with Conkreta Robotics equipment on the OP Kiwi Sole line. Photo: ABB

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