Driverless farm equipment to be featured at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show

WOODSTOCK — Visitors to this year’s Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show on Sept. 10-12 will get a chance to view state-of-the-art technology, as a driverless machine designed to pick up farm equipment and carry it out to the field will be featured for the first time in Eastern Canada.

Dot Technology Corp., a Saskatchewan-based company, will be showing its autonomous diesel-powered 175-horsepower machine that it says provides 20 per cent savings on fuel, labour and equipment capital costs.

The U-shaped mechanical frame — called the Dot power platform — drives itself under other pieces of farming implements and automatically hooks itself onto that equipment to become one machine. The platform costs $350,000. Equipment would have to be modified to allow the platform to hook onto it. Dot also sells implements such as a grain cart, air seeder and a sprayer that comes with the hookups.

Dot Technology already has a DOT platform that is ideal for fields such as canola, wheat and peas, and hopes to have 25 of those running in Canada by spring planting next year.

Dot will be offering demonstrations of its new machine, designed for corn and soybean fields, at the Outdoor Farm Show. DOT business development manager Cory Beaujot told Farmers Forum that the company hopes to have the technology available for Ontario farmers within two years. The machine is about 20 feet long and 12 feet high and can carry 40,000-lb. of equipment.

The platform can be controlled through a remote or tablet. It can also go through a field by itself using a pre-set map that has been downloaded onto the platform’s computer. The autonomous mode cannot work outside of the selected boundary of any approved path, which includes roads. The machine is also equipped with a camera so a farmer can see the progress without having to go out to the field.

About 40,000 people are expected to attend the three-day show at Canada’s Outdoor Park at Woodstock.