Guiding Strategy based on Laser and Template Matching for Autonomous Vehicles in Greenhouses

This paper presents a guiding strategy for autonomous vehicles working in greenhouses based on laser and vision. It follows the idea of auto-guided vehicles but despite of establishing the desired route on the ground (like auto-guided vehicles), here a mesh of laser emitters are managed to establish the route. In particular, a vision-based algorithm (template matching) is employed to detect the position of such laser points which hit a set of dartboards installed on the front and lateral parts of a autonomous vehicle. Several physical experiments show the performance of the proposed vision approach which will permit to carry out physical experiments using the whole proposed navigation strategy.