Abstract
A novel, low-cost approach to high-accuracy robot localization for agricultural applications using an image-processing triple-laser-guided (TLG) system coupled with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is presented in this paper. The TLG system consists of a laser-pointing unit (LPU) at the base station and a laser-target unit (LTU) at the mobile robot. The robot’s XYZ position and heading are determined from the positions and the angles relative to the field of both LPU and LTU. The robot’s roll and pitch are determined by the IMU sensor fusion with complementary filter. The IMU-coupled TLG system is demonstrated on an outdoor, $20 \times 21$ m flat field at various light intensities. The overall lateral and vertical accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are 1.68 cm and 0.59 cm, respectively. The overall heading, roll, and pitch accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are 0.90°, 0.78°, and 0.76°, respectively. The lateral and heading accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are found to be comparable to commercially available GNSS-INS systems from NovAtel and Trimble, while the total cost of the IMU-coupled TLG system is only a fraction of the total cost of the commercially available localization systems.
Highlights
Automatic machinery has been widely researched and applied in the agricultural industry to increase productivity and reduce costs
To provide an alternative to the conventional, expensive RTK GNSS-INS system, this paper presents a low-cost, inertial measurement unit (IMU)-coupled triple-laser-guided (TLG) system that provides high localization accuracy and precision for both indoor and outdoor environment at a substantially lower cost
BRIEF INNOVATION DESCRIPTION The IMU-coupled TLG system consists of a base station with a laser-pointing unit (LPU) and a mobile unit with a lasertarget unit (LTU)
Summary
Automatic machinery has been widely researched and applied in the agricultural industry to increase productivity and reduce costs. The decrease in the satellite transmissivity due to signal blockage and multipath effect from neighboring buildings or trees and cloudy weather can lead to the deterioration of the RTK GNSS-INS system’s positioning accuracy and precision. This limits the operation of RTK GNSS-INS system to only an open, outdoor environment under open-sky conditions. Multi-antenna GNSS systems were shown to improve the heading accuracy and RTK availability/success rate in signal-challenging areas [23]–[25]. All of these could lead to increase cost and complexity to the end users significantly. To provide an alternative to the conventional, expensive RTK GNSS-INS system, this paper presents a low-cost, inertial measurement unit (IMU)-coupled triple-laser-guided (TLG) system that provides high localization accuracy and precision for both indoor and outdoor environment at a substantially lower cost
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