The automated tractor project aims to lay down the foundations for automated farming equipment that could theoretically function on environments unlike that on Earth. Running on electricity not only because combustion engines require precious gas and oxygen, but also because electricity is feasibly obtainable by the way of solar panels.

Agriculture, like all processes, must be broken down into multiple tasks. The first order of business is to till the land; this automated tractor is meant to automate this first task. By modifying a children's toy car and adding a plow, this "tractor" is able to till the land in small-scale operations. This is a small-scale prototype capable of tilling a small lawn devoid of any obstacles such as rocks, as toy cars do not produce large amounts of power.In order to be used on an industrial scale, the tractor will need to be larger, heavier, and possibly equipped with tracks instead of wheels in order to traverse less-than-ideal terrain. Other parts of farming, like clearing the area of obstructions before tilling the land, are needed in order to fully automate the farming process.

Automating the tractor was not an easy process; it was a process that required creativity. Initially, we wanted to use servomotors to directly access the controls of the tractor in order to control it. However, that proved to be an impractical solution compared to somehow hacking the remote control. We opened the remote expecting a membrane sheet, but thankfully were met with mechanical buttons. We used relays connected to an Arduino to control the tractor, and used a Raspberry Pi and PiCam with OpenCV to create the software to actually tell the tractor what to do.