Correspondence Tuan D. Le and Vignesh R. Ponnambalam, Department of Science and Technology, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway, 1433. Email: tuan.dung.le@nmbu.no (T. D. L.) and vignesh.raja.ponnambalam@nmbu.no (V. R. P.) Abstract In this paper, we present an automatic motion planner for agricultural robots that allows us to set up a robot to follow rows without having to explicitly enter waypoints. In most cases, when robots are used to cover large agricultural areas, they will need waypoints as inputs, either as premeasured coordinates in an outdoor environment, or as positions in a map in an indoor environment. This can be a tedious process as several hundreds or even thousands of waypoints will be needed for large farms. In particular, we find that in unstructured environments such as the ones found on farms, the need for waypoints increases. In this paper, we present an approach that enables robots to safely traverse not only between straight rows but also through curved rows without the need for any predetermined waypoints. Most types of infrastructure found in agriculture, such as polytunnels, are built on uneven terrain, thus containing a mix of straight and curved plant rows, for which traditional methods of row following will fail. Different from traditional approaches of row following that only consider straight‐line‐of‐sight rows, our approach identifies the rows on each side with the goal of staying in the middle of the rows, even if the rows are not straight. Waypoints are only needed on the very extreme of the rows, and these will be automatically generated by the system. With our approach, the robot can just be placed in the corner of the field and will then determine the trajectory without further input from the user. We thus obtain an approach that can reduce the installation time from potentially hours to just a matter of minutes. The final autonomous system is low cost and efficient for various tasks that requires moving between plant rows inside a polytunnel. Several experiments were performed and the robot demonstrates 1.4% position drift over 21m of navigation path.

中文翻译：

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一种用于多隧道食品生产的低成本高效自主行跟随机器人

通信 Tuan D. Le 和 Vignesh R. Ponnambalam，挪威生命科学大学科技系，Ås，挪威，1433。电子邮件：tuan.dung.le@nmbu.no (TDL) 和 vignesh.raja.ponnambalam@ nmbu.no (VRP) Abstract 在本文中，我们提出了一种农业机器人的自动运动规划器，它允许我们设置机器人来跟随行而无需明确输入航点。在大多数情况下，当机器人被用于覆盖大面积的农业区域时，它们需要将航点作为输入，或者作为室外环境中的预先测量坐标，或者作为室内环境中地图中的位置。这可能是一个乏味的过程，因为大型农场将需要数百甚至数千个航路点。特别是，我们发现在非结构化环境中，例如在农场中发现的环境，对航路点的需求增加。在本文中，我们提出了一种方法，使机器人不仅可以在直线行之间安全穿越，而且还可以在不需要任何预定航路点的情况下安全穿越弯曲行。农业中发现的大多数类型的基础设施，例如多隧道，都建在不平坦的地形上，因此包含直线和弯曲植物行的混合，传统的行跟踪方法将失败。与仅考虑直线视线行的传统行跟踪方法不同，我们的方法识别每一侧的行，目标是保持在行的中间，即使行不直。航点只需要在最极端的行上，这些将由系统自动生成。通过我们的方法，机器人只需放置在场地的角落，然后无需用户进一步输入即可确定轨迹。因此，我们获得了一种方法，可以将安装时间从可能的几个小时减少到几分钟。最终的自治系统对于需要在多隧道内的植物行之间移动的各种任务来说成本低且高效。进行了几次实验，机器人在 21m 的导航路径上展示了 1.4% 的位置漂移。