• John Deere, a leading provider of farming equipment, has acquired Light, a California-based company offering autonomous vehicle vision systems. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

• As per the deal, John Deere will get access to Light’s patented technology, intellectual property, and a team of employees. Founded in 2013, Light uses a multi-camera depth perception platform that offers high-resolution sensing and detection to support autonomous driving.

<ul><li>For John Deere, this acquisition is expected to accelerate the development and deployment of AI vision systems in the company’s tractors. John Deere will integrate Light’s Clarity platform into its 8R tractor, the company's upcoming fully autonomous tractor announced at the start of this year. Clarity is a camera-based vision platform that can detect objects from 10 cm up to 1,000 m away and supplements the existing stereo camera vision systems.</ul>

• John Deere is adopting a vision-based approach for its autonomous tractors over other technologies such as laser imaging, detection, and ranging (LiDAR), as the former can reportedly detect weeds better in real time. The company also stated that due to dust and moving parts, LiDAR technology performs poorly compared to vision-based systems. 

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: John Deere has been actively working on developing its autonomous technology to launch a fully autonomous tractor for the agriculture industry. John Deere’s fully autonomous tractor is stated to be ready for large-scale production and is expected to launch in the market later this year. The company initially entered the autonomous space in 2017 by acquiring Blue River Technologies and then acquired Bear Flag Robotics to further support the development of autonomous tractors.</ul>