Development of a following agricultural machinery automatic navigation system

Abstract

To achieve large-scale automatic operation of agricultural machinery, we designed and developed a following agricultural machinery automatic navigation system. The system consists of a master and a slave agricultural machinery. The master is auto-pilot or manual driving, and the slave follows the master to perform an automatic navigation task. The automatic navigation system adopts a steering wheel control method and consists of a positioning unit, steering control device, wireless communication unit, and vehicle terminal device. Among which, the positioning unit is a global navigation satellite system receiver. The steering control device includes a steering wheel rotation control unit and a front-wheel rotation angle detection feedback unit. The wireless communication unit adopts a data transmission radio to transfer the information between the master and the slaves. The vehicle terminal equipment uses an industrial computer to make navigation decisions and generate instructions. The vehicle terminal software of the master–slave navigation system, including agricultural machinery positioning, data communication, navigation, and tracking control modules, was designed. This system can realize data communication, processing, storage, and display. To verify the performance of the designed system, a pilot battery car was used as the master, and the Euro-leopard M904-D tractor (LOVOL Inc., China) was used as the slave. Experimental results showed that the performance of the system is stable, and the slave can autonomously follow the master at a vehicle speed of 0.8 m/s. Furthermore, the root-mean-square error is 6.76 cm, which can satisfy the field operation requirements.