Research on a working station for autonomous bio-production robots

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To overcome facing difficulties of Japanese agriculture, autonomous traveling technology was investigated as a base of development of robots for agricultural use. For completion of development of fully automated operations by using agricultural machines, it is requisite to realize automatic refilling of agricultural material or automatic exchange of implements by an autonomous vehicle itself. In this study we concentrated on a searching method of an object to approach, such as a refilling container of fertilizer or an implement to be mounted, and a control method to approach it.The positioning method of an object that used triangulation surveying with a simple laser sensor was developed. It was confirmed by actual experiment that the accuracy of the developed positioning system was less than 10cm in the distance less than 7m.The developed approaching control is basically an open loop control which steers the vehicle on the trajectory designed from given conditions previously. At first it was shown that we can design a trajectory from given initial conditions by using linearized motion equations of the center of the vehicle's real axle. Though the trajectory method for the implement mounted on the vehicle was derived in the same manner, the control parameters have to be determined by a searching. In addition the feasibility of the methods were checked through simulation studies. Finally the performance of the controller was examined in field experiments by using an autonomous tractor of actual size. As a result the final positional error at the target point was less than 1% in the range of tested on concrete roads.As a result of image processing, detection of boundary from a noisy image was developed. And the other application of image processing enabled us to find out moving objects in the surrounding area. It might be applicable as a safety device for autonomous vehicles.