Automatic Guidance of Agricultural Field Machinery

Systems developed to automatically guide agricultural field machinery were previously restricted to special applications because no universal sensor system could be provided. Recently this has changed due to the tremendous progress in electronics performance and performance/price ratio. Machine vision as well as satellite positioning systems promise to serve as an appropriate and universal sensor. Moreover, it will be described that both capabilities, as well as most of the hardware for automatic guidance, is or will be available on field machinery. The objective of this paper is to introduce a concept which makes use of these components to minimize the costs of implementation. To maintain universality, not just universal sensors are needed, but an open and modular system architecture is required. A symbolic course description is proposed for defining tasks associated with vehicle guidance .