'We' have already succeeded in autonomous driving in agricultural and mining domains - these are much simpler, more tightly controlled and less liability prone than open highways and suburban backstreets.
eg:
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
Current advancements already allow tractors to go autonomously go over the bulk of the same large areas of ground that they have for the past decade (already logged and recorded), graceful fallback alerts remote farmer to make a human decision re: tree falls, new rocks, unexpected gear state changes.
These are useful advancements in machine control.
These developments have locally run in parallel with the above linked Rio Tinto work here in W.Australia - it's a pity the largest mining operation on the globe has imagined its work to be productive and useful and allowed its cost analysis to sway its thinking lacking your insight to the contrary.
I work for John Deere, I can't speak for the company.
One big tractor isn't a full-time job's worth of maintenance.
Now, the video is shot in a shiny nice weather day. Now imagine how would it perform if it's raining since last Tuesday.
There's also energy costs to consider; does a drone swarm use more or less energy than a large tractor for the same result? I'm not sure what the answer is there, and I suppose it depends quite a bit on what kind of work is being done.
farms are pretty automated these days, maybe 100% when tractors can self-repair; which maybe is not _that_ far away… because some already give reports of what went wrong to the central
Yeah, nobody suggested that we have building size tractors so I don't know what you're arguing.
They were talking about "current farming machine sized ones" vs "a drone with some crap attached"
The only reason you think it's easy is because you ignore the number and just imagine doing it once anyway.
(40 hours / 10,000 batteries = 14.4 seconds per battery; USA minimum wage = $7.25/h = $290 per 40h week, about the same as the cheapest hydraulic lift I saw on machinemart.co.uk at current exchange rates, but I'm not a mechanic so I don't know if that would be the right tool for the job anyway).
And of course, the same applies if we really had drone swarms — anything like this would be automated, up to and including full disassembly of damaged units so their parts could be reused for new units, e.g. https://youtu.be/pDZdnbI0MAc
Big farm will also have more than one machine and the "downtime" will be mostly scheduled maintenance, very little chance of your equipment just deciding to not work today. In case of many smaller farms, well, you can ask the neighbour... from what I remember from living in small village with many farmers "harvest" was often few farms pooling their resources and doing all the fields together, instead of each doing their own.
But we had made it so much more complicated because we couldn’t see the few simple rules that each of them were following.
Honestly, I think robot swarms will be simpler than large singles.
I hope you don't mean "Boids" and the three-four simple rules, because that's just an approximation of a swarm behavior made for artistic purposes - i.e. the result is supposed to pass as a flock of birds or a school of fish to casual onlookers (e.g. gamers, audience of a movie), and not to be accurate to the real thing.
I'd like to add, that while individual behavior is difficult to predict, a general motion prediction can be much easier. (Think shepherds, for example)
The "swarm" is meaningless there. Each node need to have minimum amount of sensing and computation to handle that job.
It's also at worst "a sloped square" so there is no "swarm mechanic" to move around, just zigzag around the field.