AUTOMATIC GUIDANCE SENSORS FOR AGRICULTURAL FIELD MACHINES - A REVIEW

The need for automatic guidance and the problems, both technical and economic,associated with its introduction into agricultural field operations are discussed. Traditional agricultural guidance technologies such as leader cables and mechanical methods are examined as well as more recently proposed techniques. These can be categorized into those which sense local features such as furrows or plant rows and those which work on a large-scale absolute coordinate system. For completely general full automation the latter is preferable. However, the accuracy currently achieved by such systems using radio or satellite navigation technique is relatively poor. This makes a combination approach, using also a short range relative sensing technique such as computer vision, a promising area for research. Optical systems using lasers are capable of providing absolute location with adequate accuracy, but they require further development and will always be limited to line of sight. © 1991 Silsoe Research Institute.