Improving the manual harvesting operation efficiency by coordinating a fleet of N-trailer vehicles

In the last few years, automatic guidance of agricultural vehicles has received increased interest to improve field efficiency, while releasing human workers from monotonous operations. this context, work proposes a short or medium-term alternative complete automation manual harvesting processes by introducing fleet robotic N-trailer support crop transportation task. With aim coordinate several which share workspace with pickers, presents decentralized cooperative navigation strategy that divides into areas, allocates an active vehicle per area, determines number trailers use according payload capacity and maneuverability constraints, coordinates departure time backup N-trailers in order reduce non-productive times. The proposed includes sequence generation stage based on centralized global information, dynamic route planning both local information. make robust against variability rate uncertainties about productivity, information is continuously updated vehicles. A simulator was built evaluate performance realistic scenarios having different productivity machinery availability. Thus, using large properly coordinated them workspace, results showed efficiency improvement up 82% respect basic case where two (one one vehicle) were used cover whole field, as reported literature.