Research on a visual positioning method of paddy field weeding wheels based on laser rangefinder-camera calibration

Abstract

The positioning of paddy field weeding wheels is of great significance for compensating the operation deviation between the weeding wheel and the seedling row in paddy field mechanical weeding. In this paper, a visual positioning method for determining the three-dimensional coordinates of weeding wheels in the camera coordinate system is proposed. By fixing the laser rangefinder with the weeding wheel, the proposed method converts the positioning of weeding wheels into solving the relative pose relationship between the laser rangefinder and the camera. Then, based on the constraints of the laser spots on the AprilTag calibration plane, a nonlinear optimization model is established to obtain the relative pose parameters. In the experiment, two evaluation indicators were proposed to evaluate the calibration accuracy. The experimental results showed that the proposed visual positioning method of the weeding wheel can reach a mean positioning error of 2.766 mm and a mean pixel error of 7.161 pixels.