The government plans to support the introduction of self-driving tractors amid growing hopes that such machines will help farmers cope with labor shortages at a time when many of them are aging and face difficulties finding successors.

In June, Kubota Corp. started selling the country's first tractors with autonomous driving functions on a trial basis. Utilizing the Global Positioning System, the tractors can keep tabs on where they are operating.

As the machines still need to be monitored with the naked eye, Kubota assumes that farmers will operate two tractors at a time, one with a driver and the other unmanned.

Having two tractors operate simultaneously in this way on farmland with 3,000-5,000 square meters would shorten the work time by around 30 pct, according to Satoshi Iida, a senior managing executive officer of Kubota.

Yanmar Co. and Iseki & Co. are also speeding up the development of self-driving tractors.

Yanmar is pinning high hopes on the Michibiki No. 2 quasi-zenith satellite, which was launched in June by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd. and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with the aim of establishing Japan's version of the GPS.

Yanmar expects that autonomous tractors will come into wider use if the new satellite, which is slated to begin operating in fiscal 2018, can help boost tractor positioning accuracy and farmers' work efficiency.

In March, the agriculture ministry drew up guidelines on safety standards for self-driving agricultural machinery. It plans to establish by 2020 a system that allows farmers to operate such machines only with remote monitoring or other means.

Based on this prospect, Kubota plans to release fully unmanned autonomous agricultural machinery.

"Labor-saving and productivity-enhancing technologies support the management of large-scale farming operations on consolidated farmland," an official at the ministry's Agricultural Production Bureau said. (Jiji Press)