Platooning Tractors

A farmer, two tractors. That’s what the Austrian tractor manufacturer Lindner demonstrated a few weeks ago, introducing the technology with the phrase „That’s what we can do, if it were legal.“ Similar to the road maintenance vehicles, a second tractor is following a manually driven one across the fields and does the job by using the Follow-me-function.

But the TracLink-pilot allows more. By following the first tractor it can learn the patterns and routes to autonomously driving those routes without a lead-vehicle. The system was developed by German transmission manufacturer ZF in collaboration with Lindner.

Until this is legal, some laws have to be changed. So far the laws are prohibiting the use of autonomous vehicles in Austria.

The following video demonstrates how this works:

This article has also been published in German.