Abstract
Ground bearing capacity has become a relevant concept for site-specific management that aims to protect soil from the compaction and the rutting produced by the indiscriminate use of agricultural and forestry machines. Nevertheless, commonly known techniques for its estimation are cumbersome and time-consuming. In order to alleviate these difficulties, this paper introduces an innovative sensory system based on Visible-Near InfraRed (VIS-NIR), Short-Wave InfraRed (SWIR) and Long-Wave InfraRed (LWIR) imagery and a sequential algorithm that combines a registration procedure, a multi-class SVM classifier, a K-means clustering and a linear regression for estimating the ground bearing capacity. To evaluate the feasibility and capabilities of the presented approach, several experimental tests were carried out in a sandy-loam terrain. The proposed solution offers notable benefits such as its non-invasiveness to the soil, its spatial coverage without the need for exhaustive manual measurements and its real time operation. Therefore, it can be very useful in decision making processes that tend to reduce ground damage during agricultural and forestry operations.
Highlights
The utilisation of wheeled and tracked vehicles is a widespread practice in agriculture and forestry applications [1]
This paper proposes an arrangement composed of a Short-Wave InfraRed (SWIR) camera, a Long-Wave InfraRed (LWIR) camera and a Visible-Near InfraRed (VIS-NIR)
The proposed solution is based on the combination of a P25 LWIR camera (FLIR, Wilsonville, OR, USA) a GoldEye P-032 SWIR camera (Allied Vision, Stradtroda, Germany) and a VIS-NIR system that comprises an Allied Vision AVT Prosilica GC2450 high resolution monochrome camera, a custom-made filter wheel, and a servomotor that allows interchanging two band-pass optical filters with centre wavelengths of 624 nm and 950 nm
Summary
The utilisation of wheeled and tracked vehicles is a widespread practice in agriculture and forestry applications [1]. Operations with this kind of heavy machines can cause compaction and rutting, producing severe soil damage [2,3,4]. When soil is compacted and/or rutted, its porosity decreases, and the amount of oxygen that is required for a healthy function of plant roots [6]. Water-air relationship, as well as the microbiological activity may be drastically disturbed by compaction or rutting, significantly reducing the potential for growth and survival of plants [8,9]. Estimation of ground bearing capacity becomes an important factor to be considered for achieving efficient and environmental friendly propulsion of both manned and autonomous agricultural and forest vehicles
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