Operating agricultural equipment accurately can be difficult, tedious, or even hazardous. Automatic control offers many potential advantages over human control; however, previous efforts to automate agricultural vehicles have been unsuccessful due to sensor limitations. With the recent development of Carrier Phase Differential GPS (CDGPS) technology, a single inexpensive GPS receiver can measure a vehicle's position to within a few centimeters and heading to within 0.1°. The ability to provide accurate real‐time information about multiple vehicle states makes CDGPS ideal for automatic control of vehicles.

    In this work, a CDGPS‐based steering control system was designed, simulated, and tested on a large farm tractor. A highly simplified vehicle model proved sufficient for accurate controller design. After various calibration tests, closed‐loop heading control was demonstrated to a one‐σ accuracy of better than 1°, and closed‐loop line tracking to a standard deviation of better than 2.5 cm. Future plans for research include the use of a pseudo‐satellite to eliminate any position bias and extending the current control system to control a towed implement.


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    Title :

    Automatic Steering of Farm Vehicles Using GPS


    Contributors:
    Robert, P.C. (editor) / Rust, R.H. (editor) / Larson, W.E. (editor) / O'Connor, M. (author) / Bell, T. (author) / Elkaim, G. (author) / Parkinson, B. (author)


    Publication date :

    1996-01-01


    Size :

    11 pages




    Type of media :

    Article/Chapter (Book)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




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