Automated generation of guidance lines for operational field planning

A number of advanced satellite positioning based systems for agricultural machines have been developed and are commercial available for aiding and supporting navigation efforts up to full auto steering Furthermore in terms of the route planning for agricultural field operations advanced methods based on combinatorial optimisation of fieldwork patterns have recently been introduced In order to apply and implement these methods in the high level control system of agricultural machines an appropriate representation of the field as a geometrical entity made up of discrete geometric primitives such as points lines and polygons is needed Preferably such a representation must be generated in real time providing the input to the whole accuracy range of navigation systems as well as the range of operation types equipment characteristics and machinery kinematics Here a method for real time generation of field geometrical representation for operational planning is presented The representation regards simple or complex fields for both convex and non convex field boundaries where generated tracks can be straight or curved As demonstration cases for the method, 15 different field types were evaluated According to the experimental results the computational time of the method was in the range of 0 11-239 73s for the case of single block fields and in the range of 2 24-402 59 s for multiple blocks fields The tested fields were of different shapes and the area ranged from 0 21 ha to 44 93 ha (C) 2010 lAgrE Published by Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved