Development of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle Platform for Autonomous Navigation in Paddy Field

The objective of this research was to develop an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) platform for autonomous navigation in the paddy field. The surface vehicle used in this research was a radio controlled air propeller vessel that had been modified into an unmanned surface vehicle platform. A GPS compass system was attached to the top of the USV platform as the navigation system to provide the position and heading angle. The USV platform can autonomously navigate to the predefined navigation map. From the GPS trajectory data of the map-based navigation experiment, the in-system root mean square (RMS) lateral error from the target path was observed to be less than 0.45 m, and the in-system RMS heading error was 4.4 degree or less. The final goal of the research is going to realize the autonomous weeding, intelligent fertilization or paddy growth management based on this USV platform.