No abstract

Various types of sensors technologies, such as machine vision and global positioning system (GPS) have been implemented in navigation of agricultural vehicles. Automated navigation systems have proved the potential for the execution of optimised route plans for field area coverage. This paper presents an assessment of the reduction of the energy requirements derived from the implementation of optimised field area coverage planning. The assessment regards the analysis of the energy requirements and the comparison between the non-optimised and optimised plans for field area coverage in the whole sequence of operations required in two different cropping systems: Miscanthus and Switchgrass production. An algorithmic approach for the simulation of the executed field operations by following both non-optimised and optimised field-work patterns was developed. As a result, the corresponding time requirements were estimated as the basis of the subsequent energy cost analysis. Based on the results, the optimised routes reduce the fuel energy consumption up to 8%, the embodied energy consumption up to 7%, and the total energy consumption from 3% up to 8%.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Advanced systems for manned and/or agricultural vehicles—such as systems for auto-steering, navigation-adding, and autonomous route planning—require new capabilities in terms of the internal representation for the autonomous system of the working space; that is, the generation of a metric map that provides by numerical parameters any operation-related entity of the working space. In this paper, a real-time approach was developed for the generation of the field metric map, based on a row generation method (polygons-based geometry). The approach can deal with fields with or without in-field obstacles, where the generated field-work tracks can be either straight or curved. The functionality of the approach was demonstrated on 12 fields with different number of obstacles ranging from one to six. The test results showed that the computational times were in the range of 0.26–24.51 s. The presented tool brings a number of advancements on the process of generating a metric map for arable farming field operations, including the real-time generation feature, the potential to deal with multiple-obstacle areas, and the reduction in the overlapped area.

No abstract

Capacitated field operations involve input/output material flows where there are capacity constraints in the form of a specific load that a vehicle can carry. As such, a specific normal-sized field cannot be covered in one single operation using only one load, and the vehicle needs to get serviced (i.e., refilling) from out-of-field facilities (depot). Although several algorithms have been developed to solve the routing problem of capacitated operations, these algorithms only considered one depot. The general goal of this paper is to develop a route planning tool for agricultural machines with multiple depots. The tool presented consists of two modules: the first one regards the field geometrical representation in which the field is partitioned into tracks and headland passes; the second one regards route optimization that is implemented by the metaheuristic simulated annealing (SA) algorithm. In order to validate the developed tool, a comparison between a well-known route planning approach, namely B-pattern, and the algorithm presented in this study was carried out. The results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the B-pattern by up to 20.0% in terms of traveled nonworking distance. The applicability of the tool developed was tested in a case study with seven scenarios differing in terms of locations and number of depots. The results of this study illustrated that the location and number of depots significantly affect the total nonworking traversal distance during a field operation.