The goal of this article is to assess the feasibility of estimating the state of various rotating components in agro-industrial machinery by employing just one vibration signal acquired from a single point on the machine chassis. To do so, a Support Vector Machine (SVM)-based system is employed. Experimental tests evaluated this system by acquiring vibration data from a single point of an agricultural harvester, while varying several of its working conditions. The whole process included two major steps. Initially, the vibration data were preprocessed through twelve feature extraction algorithms, after which the Exhaustive Search method selected the most suitable features. Secondly, the SVM-based system accuracy was evaluated by using Leave-One-Out cross-validation, with the selected features as the input data. The results of this study provide evidence that (i) accurate estimation of the status of various rotating components in agro-industrial machinery is possible by processing the vibration signal acquired from a single point on the machine structure; (ii) the vibration signal can be acquired with a uniaxial accelerometer, the orientation of which does not significantly affect the classification accuracy; and, (iii) when using an SVM classifier, an 85% mean cross-validation accuracy can be reached, which only requires a maximum of seven features as its input, and no significant improvements are noted between the use of either nonlinear or linear kernels.

Low-cost GPS receivers provide geodetic positioning information using the NMEA protocol, usually with eight digits for latitude and nine digits for longitude. When these geodetic coordinates are converted into Cartesian coordinates, the positions fit in a quantization grid of some decimeters in size, the dimensions of which vary depending on the point of the terrestrial surface. The aim of this study is to reduce the quantization errors of some low-cost GPS receivers by using a Kalman filter. Kinematic tractor model equations were employed to particularize the filter, which was tuned by applying Monte Carlo techniques to eighteen straight trajectories, to select the covariance matrices that produced the lowest Root Mean Square Error in these trajectories. Filter performance was tested by using straight tractor paths, which were either simulated or real trajectories acquired by a GPS receiver. The results show that the filter can reduce the quantization error in distance by around 43%. Moreover, it reduces the standard deviation of the heading by 75%. Data suggest that the proposed filter can satisfactorily preprocess the low-cost GPS receiver data when used in an assistance guidance GPS system for tractors. It could also be useful to smooth tractor GPS trajectories that are sharpened when the tractor moves over rough terrain.

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Error is always present in the GPS guidance of a tractor along a desired trajectory. One way to reduce GPS guidance error is by improving the tractor positioning. The most commonly used ways to do this are either by employing more precise GPS receivers and differential corrections or by employing GPS together with some other local positioning systems such as electronic compasses or Inertial Navigation Systems (INS). However, both are complex and expensive solutions. In contrast, this article presents a simple and low cost method to improve tractor positioning when only a GPS receiver is used as the positioning sensor. The method is based on placing the GPS receiver ahead of the tractor, and on applying kinematic laws of tractor movement, or a geometric approximation, to obtain the midpoint position and orientation of the tractor rear axle more precisely. This precision improvement is produced by the fusion of the GPS data with tractor kinematic control laws. Our results reveal that the proposed method effectively reduces the guidance GPS error along a straight trajectory.