Research on 2D Laser Automatic Navigation Control for Standardized Orchard

Abstract

With the increase of labor cost and the development of agricultural mechanization, standardized orchards suitable for autonomous operations of agricultural machinery will be a future development trend of the fruit-planting industry. For field-planting processes of standardized orchards, autonomous navigation of orchard vehicles in complex environments is the foundation of mechanized and intelligent field operations. In order to realize autonomous driving and path-tracking of vehicles in complex standardized orchards that involve much noise and interference between rows of fruit trees, an automatic navigation system was designed for orchard vehicles, based on 2D lasers. First, considering the agronomic requirements for orchard planting such as plant spacing, row spacing and trunk diameter, different filtering thresholds were established to eliminate discrete points of 2D laser point cloud data effectively. Euclidean clustering algorithm and the important geometric theorems of three points collinearity was used to extract the central feature points of the trunk, as the same time, navigation path was fitted based on the least square method. Secondly, an automatic navigation control algorithm was designed, and the fuzzy control was used to realize the dynamic adjustment of the apparent distance of the pure pursuit model. Finally, the reliability of the proposed approach was verified by simulation using MATLAB/Simulink, and field tests were carried out based on electric agricultural vehicle. Experimental results show that the method proposed in this study can effectively improve the precision of automatic navigation in complex orchard environment and realize the autonomous operation of orchard vehicles.

Design of an Automatic Navigation and Operation System for a Crawler-Based Orchard Sprayer Using GNSS Positioning

“…The distance between the two tracks is denoted as d, and ω represents the angular velocity. AB represents the target flight path, and O 2 corresponds to the next target point [18][19][20][21][22]. By considering two-dimensional plane geometry and the relationship between the angular velocity of circular motion and linear velocity, the velocity v of the tracked platform's center of mass can be calculated using the sprayer's motion model derivation as in Equation ( 1):…”

Design and development of orchard autonomous navigation spray system

“…The accuracy is poor, and is seriously reduced in dim light and at night, failing to meet the needs of overnight operation in orchards Lidar (Bergerman et al, 2015;Blok et al, 2019;Jones et al, 2019;Guevara et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2020) The cost is high, and is greatly affected by bad weather such as rain and snow…”

“…Exploring an automatic sprayer with a high degree of automation and a high pesticide utilization is a hot spot for agricultural machinists. There are mainly two thorny problems in the development of automated orchard sprayers: one is to achieve efficient penetration of pesticides in a low dense canopy and reduce the loss of chemical solution ( Meng et al, 2022 ; Wang C. et al, 2022 ), while the other is to let the machine traverse the orchard autonomously without manual control in the orchard with a closed canopy and blocked vision ( Bergerman et al, 2015 ; Ye et al, 2018 ; Zhang et al, 2020 ). Considerable research has been conducted on the above two issues.…”

Information Perception Method for Fruit Trees Based on 2D LiDAR Sensor

“…Two-dimensional LiDAR sensors can be used to scan orchard environments and perform data clustering to extract the arc information of trunks [14,15]. Besides obtaining fruit tree information from clustering, 2D LiDAR sensors can be used to extract the central feature point data of tree trunks using the Euclidean clustering algorithm and the important geometric theorem of three-point collinearity [16]. Three-dimensional LiDAR sensor data are more abundant than 2D LiDAR sensor data, so many people use 3D LiDAR sensors for tree detection [17,18].…”