Implementation of autonomous mobile platform for agricultural task in corridor-like environments

Abstract

The role of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in assisting people is recognised and, therefore, is in constant development in numerous fields. Specifically, the ability of AV to alleviate global stressors, including an increased potential for food shortages and the decline in workers for potentially laborious work. An area where AVs developments are particularly prevalent is in agriculture. However, the few AVs being used in agriculture are often custom-built for specific purposes and require long development time as a result. This article aims to build and evaluate a versatile architecture of a mobile platform that is implemented using off-the-shelf components so that it can be transferred to any agricultural vehicle, thus reducing the development time. The research has involved investigating and incorporating various sensors, and also developing a common software module to perform the localisation, navigation and mapping particularly suited for corridor crop agricultural environment. This architecture has been integrated and implemented on a Yamaha golf cart, infusing it with purposely positioned sensors and supportive electronics to allow a Robotic Operating System (ROS) framework to gather information and control the vehicle. As the architecture is modular in nature, it can be transferred to different customised platforms. To determine the efficacy of the mobile platform, it has gone through several outdoor field trials to test the fundamentals of an agricultural AV. The evaluation demonstrates that both mapping and navigation have satisfactory results and the mobile platform remains within 5mm of the specified distance when aiming to follow the row in a vineyard. The results from these experiments demonstrate the ability of the mobile platform to successfully transform a Yamaha golf cart into an autonomous agricultural vehicle.