Simplified vision based automatic navigation for wheat harvesting in low\n income economies

Abstract

Recent developments in the domain of agricultural robotics have resulted in\ndevelopment of complex and efficient systems. Most of the land owners in the\nSouth Asian region are low income farmers. The agricultural experience for them\nis still a completely manual process. However, the extreme weather conditions,\nheat and flooding, often combine to put a lot of stress on these small land\nowners and the associated labor. In this paper, we propose a prototype for an\nautomated power reaper for the wheat crop. This automated vehicle is navigated\nusing a simple vision based approach employing the low-cost camera and assisted\nGPS. The mechanical platform is driven by three motors controlled through an\ninterface between the proposed vision algorithm and the electrical drive. The\nproposed methodology is applied on some real field scenarios to demonstrate the\nefficiency of the vision based algorithm.\n