Development, Simulation and Visualization of Autonomous Farm Vehicles

Abstract

Abstract: A Research in Autonomous Agricultural Vehicle Technology is presented. With the coming of the Smart Farming Revolution the development of more complicated machines has begun. Agricultural machines are made with the capability of driving themselves, using GPS maps and electronic sensors, an approach that will lead to the development of futuristic Precise Autonomous Farming Systems. The basic issues to be addressed are autonomous path planning, obstacle detection and avoidance for which various sensors will be employed such as GPS, laser-based sensors, ultrasonic sensors, IMU sensors and Camera sensors whose data has to be constantly monitored using Dead Reckoning algorithm and constant Pose Estimation. In these sensors, Camera, Ultrasonic, Laser-Based Sensors are used as Detection sensors while the IMU and GPS sensors are used as Localization sensors. Global Avoidance Subsystem which examines the whole environment of an autonomous vehicle mission-level path planner that pre-plans paths around all known obstacles. While Local Avoidance Subsystem/Reactive planner consists of an obstacle filter and an obstacle avoidance algorithm and re-plans a short way for the vehicle to navigate. With the ROS framework and all sensors data, a vehicle can guide itself through an unknown environment. This will help the farmer to undercut the labour shortage and improve the precision in farming which in turn improves the output to meet the growing demands