A Design of an Autonomous Agricultural Robot to Navigate between Rows

Abstract

An ultrasonic distance measuring based row guidance method is presented to guide a robot platform which is designed independently to drive through the row crops in a field. The offset of the robot platform are detected real-time for guiding the robot inside the crop row and also turn at the end of the rows to adjacent row automatically. Preliminary experiments of row guidance were implemented in rose field. Experimental results show that algorithms of row guidance and headland turn are according to the parameters measured and analysed such as the offset for row guidance and the difference between the motion trajectory of the robot and the expected trajectory. The accuracy of row guidance is ±70mm at the speed of 1 m/s. Tractacus got the 3rd place at free style category of Field ROBOT Event 2012 with smart spraying application which is starting to spray only if it sees the crop canopy.