Abstract
The concept of precision agriculture, which proposes farming management adapted to crop variability, has emerged in recent years. To effectively implement precision agriculture, data must be gathered from the field in an automated manner at minimal cost. In this study, a small autonomous field inspection vehicle was developed to minimise the impact of the scouting on the crop and soil compaction. The proposed approach integrates a camera with a GPS receiver to obtain a set of basic behaviours required of an autonomous mobile robot to inspect a crop field with full coverage. A path planner considered the field contour and the crop type to determine the best inspection route. An image-processing method capable of extracting the central crop row under uncontrolled lighting conditions in real time from images acquired with a reflex camera positioned on the front of the robot was developed. Two fuzzy controllers were also designed and developed to achieve vision-guided navigation. A method for detecting the end of a crop row using camera-acquired images was developed. In addition, manoeuvres necessary for the robot to change rows were established. These manoeuvres enabled the robot to autonomously cover the entire crop by following a previously established plan and without stepping on the crop row, which is an essential behaviour for covering crops such as maize without damaging them.
Highlights
Farming practices have traditionally focused on uniform management of the field and ignored spatial and temporal crop variability
The proposed approach was compared with a detection method that is based on the Hough transform [30], which is a strategy that was successfully integrated in some of our previous studies [36]
The effectiveness was measured based on an expert criterion, in which the line that was detected was considered to be correct when it matched the real direction of the crop row
Summary
Farming practices have traditionally focused on uniform management of the field and ignored spatial and temporal crop variability. This approach has two main negative outcomes: a) air and soil pollution, with consequent pollution of groundwater, and b) increased production costs [1]. Agricultural production must double in the 25 years to sustain the increasing global population while utilising less soil and water. In this context, technology will become an essential aspect of minimising production costs while crops and environment are properly managed [2,3,4]. Important within PA are techniques aimed at selective treatment of weeds (site-specific management) by restricting herbicide use to infested crop areas and even varying the amount of treatment applied according to the density and/or type of weeds, in contrast to traditional weed control methods
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