Shufeng Han
John Deere – Intelligent Systems Group

Mechanization in agriculture is one of the greatest engineering achievements in the 20th century. This article provides a brief overview of the key milestones in the development of agricultural field machinery and equipment. Since the turn of the century, agricultural mechanization has entered into a new phase of development – machinery automation. In recent years, the most successful development in machinery automation has been the vehicle automatic guidance. As such, this article gives a detailed description of the principle, technology, and commercial development of the auto-guidance systems. In addition, examples of the new automation product development by the Ag equipment industry are also presented. Finally, some technical challenges and future direction in agricultural machinery automation are discussed.