Cereals, a giant trade fair for British crop farmers, is a bit of a social occasion for people whose line of work often leaves them isolated. At last year's event-a mass of tents, booths, and refreshment stands in fields in the English county of Lincolnshire-many visitors wore neat tweed or wax jackets above their waterproof Wellington boots, and some accessorized with neckties and flat caps. LG Seeds showed off varieties of winter barley not far from the enormous machines sold by New Holland and Horsch. In one of the fields, a more modest model, a small blue tractor manufactured by the Japanese company Iseki & Co. drove a figure eight in the wet grass of a fenced-in enclosure without anyone sitting in its seat. As the Iseki tractor traced its path between spaced-out bales of straw, an orange inflatable tube with a white faux head and arms periodically unfurled near the point where the figure-eight tracks crossed. It was a scarecrow called the Scarey Man, manufactured by the British company Clarratts Ltd., which in this case played the role of a hypothetical pedestrian who might wander into the tractor's path. Each time the Scarey Man ballooned up in its way, the Iseki ground to a halt several feet back. A lidar scanner, a sensor that measures distances using laser light, detected the obstacle, and the tractor's software ordered it to stop.
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