Abstract
Precision Agriculture (PA) refers to applications asking for reliable and highly available precise positions, at centimeter level, in most of operational scenarios. Machinery guidance, automatic steering and controlled traffic farming enable machinery to move along repeatable tracks on the field, minimizing pass-to-pass errors and overlaps. In the recent years, satellite-based navigation has also opened the door to (semi) autonomous machineries for some specific farming scenarios and operations. Farming industry is now looking to use small robots to bring efficiencies and benefits to farms, capable of complex tasks that have not been possible with traditional large-scale agricultural machinery. Even though the state-of-the-art Real Time Kinematic (RTK) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers usually match the requirements posed by PA applications in open fields, propagation effects degrade the performance under foliage or with surrounding obstacles. This paper presents an experimental testbed and methodology suitable to assess the real performance of RTK GNSS-based devices in operational environments. Such testbed and methodology were effective to compare different devices, which resulted to be equivalent in open-sky conditions, but with significant differences in other types of environments. The paper also discusses opportunities and current limits of GNSS for emerging PA applications based on small robots and artificial intelligence.
Highlights
The accurate and reliable estimate of vehicles’ position is at the basis of many applications for land transportation
This paper describes a possible approach to design an experimental testbed for the on-field validation of Real Time Kinematic (RTK) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-based devices employed as positioning modules in automatic machines
OPEN FIELDS The open sky conditions experienced following the trajectory in Fig. 11 are representative of open fields: at the location and time of this test, up to 13 satellites were visible with a best Position Dilution Of Precision (PDOP) equal to 1.6
Summary
The accurate and reliable estimate of vehicles’ position is at the basis of many applications for land transportation. In order to assess suitability for precision agriculture, in [16] authors compared three modes of differential corrections through specific tests carried out in static and dynamic conditions Such analysis confirmed that Real Time Kinematics (RTK) clearly provides the best performance and is the obvious choice if there are not constraints on the cost of the devices. This paper describes a possible approach to design an experimental testbed for the on-field validation of RTK GNSS-based devices employed as positioning modules in automatic machines. Such a testbed allows for reliable measurements and fair comparison of performance with respect to benchmarks.
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