Abstract
With the increase of labor cost and the development of agricultural mechanization, standardized orchards suitable for autonomous operations of agricultural machinery will be a future development trend of the fruit-planting industry. For field-planting processes of standardized orchards, autonomous navigation of orchard vehicles in complex environments is the foundation of mechanized and intelligent field operations. In order to realize autonomous driving and path-tracking of vehicles in complex standardized orchards that involve much noise and interference between rows of fruit trees, an automatic navigation system was designed for orchard vehicles, based on 2D lasers. First, considering the agronomic requirements for orchard planting such as plant spacing, row spacing and trunk diameter, different filtering thresholds were established to eliminate discrete points of 2D laser point cloud data effectively. Euclidean clustering algorithm and the important geometric theorems of three points collinearity was used to extract the central feature points of the trunk, as the same time, navigation path was fitted based on the least square method. Secondly, an automatic navigation control algorithm was designed, and the fuzzy control was used to realize the dynamic adjustment of the apparent distance of the pure pursuit model. Finally, the reliability of the proposed approach was verified by simulation using MATLAB/Simulink, and field tests were carried out based on electric agricultural vehicle. Experimental results show that the method proposed in this study can effectively improve the precision of automatic navigation in complex orchard environment and realize the autonomous operation of orchard vehicles.
Highlights
In recent years, with the acceleration of the industrialization process and the aging of the population, the problem of insufficient agricultural labor will become increasingly serious
The orchard vehicle automatic test platform based on the electric agricultural vehicle
The results show that the method of obtaining the center point feature map of trunk meets the requirements of positioning accuracy
Summary
With the acceleration of the industrialization process and the aging of the population, the problem of insufficient agricultural labor will become increasingly serious. Compared with the traditional agriculture, the management technology and the mechanization are relatively backward [1]. Traditional agricultural operations are generally carried out by people or people operating agricultural machinery, and the labor is repeated and monotonous. It is easy for the operator to fatigue, which will cause the operator’s operation accuracy to decrease and the danger to rise for a long time. The modern agricultural equipment led by agricultural robots developed later can largely solve the above problems. The system design of this project is suitable for advanced equipment for orchard operations [2,3]
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