Affiliation:
1. Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain
Abstract
After mechanization, the next disruptive technology in agriculture will probably be robotization. The introduction of information technology and automation in farm fields started in the eighties with the advent of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the subsequent development of Precision Agriculture. While being indispensable for many innovative applications, global positioning is not sufficient for all situations encountered in the field, where local sensing is essential if accurate and updated, information has to control automated vehicles. Safeguarding, high resolution mapping, and real time monitoring can only be achieved with local perception sensors such as cameras, lasers, and sonar rangers. However, machine vision offers multiple advantages over other sensing alternatives, and among imaging sensors, stereo vision provides the richest source of information for real time actuation. This chapter presents an overview of current and future applications of 3D stereo vision to off-road intelligent vehicles, with special emphasis in real problems found in agricultural environments and practical solutions devised to cope with them, as image noise, system configuration, and 3D data management. Several examples of stereo perception engines implemented in robotized off-road vehicles illustrate the concepts introduced along the chapter.