Design of Navigation System for Transportation Mobile Robot for Agricultural Farms

With the development of precision agriculture, agricultural production now demands higher requirement of automation and automatic navigation systems. In agricultural automatic navigation system, positioning and tracking are the key technologies. Its stability directly affects the reliability and security of agricultural automation equipment. Therefore, this study focused on the research of localization of vehicles and tracking in agricultural automatic navigation systems using an autonomous golf cart. Globally, agricultural farms have been suffering massive labor shortages. Especially, the transportation of agricultural products from the orchard to the packaging facilities, vegetables from farm to packaging center, is always time-consuming and labor-intensive work. Thus, this study aimed to design a navigation system for transportation mobile robot to carry agricultural products in the farms. This research used the golf cart as the research target vehicle to develop the navigation system and designed control system based on robot operating system (ROS), controller area network (CAN) bus was used to operate the communication for the whole vehicle. Kalman filter was used to fuse global navigation satellite (GNSS) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) to acquire the accurate position and navigation of the golf cart. Therefore, the positional error was less than 2 cm. Fuzzy control was employed to realize the tracking for the golf cart. Moreover, light detection and ranging (LiDAR) was utilized to avoid obstacles and finally gained self-automation as the golf cart moved to designated route to carry agricultural products and avoid obstacles. This study also made experiments for automatic driving and obstacles avoidance. The results showed that the navigation system and obstacles avoidance strategies were effective. This research can be used as the working platform of agricultural automation development to provide autonomous mobile function for carrying agricultural products.