A vision-guided mobile robot for precision agriculture

Abstract

In this paper we have developed a mobile robot which is able to perform crop-scale operations using vision as only sensor. The system consists of a row-following system and a visual odometry system. The row following system captures images from a front looking camera on the robot and the crop rows are extracted using Hough transform. Both distance to the rows and heading angle is provided which both are used to control the steering. The visual odometry system uses two cameras in a stereo setup pointing perpendicular to the ground. This system measures the travelled distance by measuring the ground movement and compensate for height variation. Experiments are performed on an artificial field due to the season. The result shows that the visual odometry have accuracy better than 2.1% of travelled distance.