GPS Guided Unmanned Ground Vehicle for

Agriculture Applications
SYNOPSIS

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the award of the degree of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY
In
ELECTRONICS AND COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

Submitted by

Poojashree B
USN: ENG17EC0073

Prajwal Raju P
USN: ENG17EC0074

Under the guidance of

Dr. Devaraju R
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Electronics & Communication,
SoE, DSU

with Affiliation

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 Dayananda Sagar University
School of Engineering
Bengaluru-560068, India

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION

I hereby declare that the in-house project presented in this synopsis titled “GPS Guided
Unmanned Ground Vehicle for Agriculture Applications” in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for of the award of the degree of Bachelor of Technology in Electronics
and Communication Engineering have to submit in School of Engineering, Dayananda
Sagar University, Bengaluru, is an authentic record of my own work that would be
carried out during 7th semester (period from Aug 2019 to Dec 2019) under the guidance
of “Dr.Devaraju R”, SoE, DSU Bengaluru.

The matter embodied in this synopsis has been submitted by us for the award of degree
of Bachelor of Technology.

Date: 12 Sept 2020 Poojashree B

Place: Bangalore Prajwal Raju P

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 ABSTRACT

There will be an increase in the demand from the food industry to the farmers to
produce more quantities of food in the coming years due to the increase in the
population. To get around this issue and help farmers to automate some of the work
involved. A vehicle is built to navigate through the Farm autonomously upon which
multiple attachments can be used to perform multiple tasks such as harvesting, weed
removal, etc. This vehicle capable of moving forward, rotating, and consists of a GPS
sensor, a magnetometer, a motor driver, and four DC motors is built using Arduino
Mega. The target coordinates to move around the field (key points) are manually
entered as a part of the control algorithm script (.ino file). The developed control
algorithm makes a blind calculation of the distance and required rotation between
consecutive key points. The initial coordinates of the vehicle, however, requires the only
field-dependent calculation of the distance and target heading between the initial and
the first key point. The whole target route around the fields is achieved by consecutive
“rotation” and “forward movements (straight path)” between key points. The GPS
sensor is used to determine the initial coordinates whereas the magnetometer is used
to determine the heading (and rotation) before (and during) each key point movement.
When taxiing through a blind-calculated route, the acquired GPS data is transmitted via
Bluetooth for offline monitoring. This allows farmers to monitor multiple vehicles
simultaneously if necessary.

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 Table of Content

1. Introduction..............................................................................................................5

2. Motivation.................................................................................................................5

3. Related work.............................................................................................................6

4. Objective...................................................................................................................6

5. Methodology.............................................................................................................6

6. Plan of work.............................................................................................................7

7. Conclusion................................................................................................................8

8.
References.................................................................................................................8

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Introduction

The current trend of research is in making everything autonomous, where robots

replace humans and perform activities. Autonomous systems are best suited for safe
and precision farming. The most important abilities of autonomous agricultural robots
can be categorized into navigation,detection, action and mapping[1]. The previous
attempts were unsuccessful due to sensor limitations. But, with the improvement in
technology in recent years the accurate model can be designed. Several variants of
these algorithms have been developed. i.e.,
The Case IH Autonomous Tractor, The New Holland Autonomous Tractor

a)Case IH is the world’s second-largest brand of agricultural equipment developed by

John Deere and a subsidiary of CNH Global N.V. In 2016, they showed the world what’s
possible with autonomous vehicles by unveiling a fully-functioning autonomous tractor
platform as a means to spur discussions with farmers around the potential for self-
driving tractors.It is going to look something like just without the human intervention
[7].

b)New Holland, produced by CNH Industrial is a global brand of agricultural machinery,

it is the same company that owns Case IH. The farming equipment brand is known for all
kinds of innovative products, like the Energy Independent farm which uses a hydrogen-
powered tractor. Like Case IH, they also debuted their NHDrive autonomous technology
in 2016 [7].

The application of autonomous robots in agriculture is gaining more and more

popularity due to the high impact it has on food security, sustainability, resource use
efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, minimization of the human effort and
maximization of yield. The current approach is to study and develop algorithms that
enable real time mapping and navigation. A class of sophisticated sensors with certain

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data fusion techniques are used for real time mapping and navigation. Over the years
many methods have been created to navigate ground robots autonomously. GPS based
navigation methods are used frequently due to the simplicity and the robustness to
environmental noises. This is enabled with real time monitoring and control of the
robot. Real time sensor data is collected and the vehicle tracks back the gps locations
and navigates the field.

Motivation

By 2050, the world’s food system industry is desperate for an overhaul, studies show,
the world will have 3 billion more mouths to feed than it does today, and demand for
food will rise by 50%. Exacerbating the problem, climate change will put more demands
on how food is grown, while fewer people will work in the farming industry.
Making the jobs in the food / Farming industry very hard.

Although investments in the agriculture sector might seem like seedlings in comparison
to overall VC funding, venture capitalists and angels are increasingly looking toward
farming as an investment opportunity. They poured $735 million into 147 deals in 2017,
according to CB Insights. That’s a jump from $57 million for 71 deals in 2013.

In addition, more of these startups are getting snapped up by big farming

conglomerates, which are building out their own ag-tech divisions. For example, farming
equipment giant Deere & Co. has an intelligent solutions group focused on precision
agriculture that employs more than 300 software developers, engineers, and testers.
Just last year, it bought precision agriculture startup Blue River Technology for $305
million. Monsanto completed one of the largest acquisitions in the space when it bought
big data company Climate Corp. for $1.1 billion in 2013.[8]

Related work

Auat Cheein and Carelli [2] provide a detailed discussion about the four core abilities of
unmanned service units in agricultural operations, namely: (i) guidance,(ii) detection,
(iii) action, and (iv) mapping. The authors demonstrate the interdependence of these
capabilities through the case study of an unmanned service unit used for supervising an
olive grove in San Juan, Argentina. In terms of guidance, Cariou et al.[3] experimentally
demonstrate a high-precision path tracking system for a generic four-wheel-steering
mobile robot navigating on the slippery ground to perform agricultural operations. In
particular, the author’s guidance algorithmic approach enables the robotic system to
automatically and accurately achieve a desired path, despite anagri field’s morphology,
terrain conditions, and any sliding phenomena. Following that, Christiansen et al. [4]
introduced the“DeepAnomaly” algorithm for the fast detection of distant and heavily
occluded obstacles in agricultural fields. Eatonet al. [5] describes a system-of-systems
architecture that could facilitate the implementation of autonomous precision farming
operations. More specifically, the authors propose and test through simulation analysis

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a kinematic model for the guidance of a tractor, under sliding phenomena and terrain
disturbances. In terms of action, Garcia-Perez et al. [6] present AGROAMARA, an agent
with behavior-based architecture, for navigating an autonomous vehicle in an olive tree
area at the Industrial Automation Institute campus in Madrid, Spain; a sensor-fusion
algorithm is also developed for enabling real-time data gathering and sharing to
navigate the vehicle under dynamic conditions.

Objective

Designing an GPS Guided Ground Vehicle that can –

⮚ Navigate in the farm autonomously with obstacle avoidance ability
⮚ Enable real time monitoring and control of the robot
⮚ Collect and send real time sensor data

Methodology

A 4X4 drive Vehicle controlled by the Arduino Mega with ATmega2560. It has 54 digital
input/output pins (of which 15 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs
(hardware serial ports), running at 16 MHz. This vehicle is equipped with 4 DC 150 RPM
high torque motors with 11cm wide wheels for better traction on the loose soil of the
farms. The Questar GPS module with a accuracy of 10 meters is implemented and it
provides the location of the vehicle, and a 3 axis digital compass GY-271 module is used
to know the direction and orientation of the vehicle.Since the GPS module can only
determine the location of the vehicle not the orientation of the vehicle compass is used.
Together the GPS provides the location of the vehicle towards which the vehicle has to
move and the compass provides the real time direction in which the vehicle is facing
which is used to determine if the vehicle has to make initial changes in the rotation of
the vehicle to move to the next GPS position.
The farmer drives the vehicle manually around the field path once, The vehicle maps the
field after this first calibration round using the GPS data points ( The same data points
can be used until the layout of the field is changed ). Then the vehicle follows the
recorded GPS data points to follow the path set by the farmer and navigate the farm
autonomously[9].

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Plan of work

September
⮚ Literature Survey
⮚ Installing the required software
October
⮚ Hardware implementation and execution.
⮚ Improvements in the accuracy and working of the sensors.
November
⮚ Manual testing
⮚ Writing Paper, Applying for journals

Conclusion

In recent years there is a high impact on food security, sustainability, resource use
efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, minimization of the human effort and
maximization of yield. In order to achieve this there is a need to develop an efficient,
farmer friendly robot which should be capable of navigating the entire farm by using
GPS and Compass. The existing implementation is either not cheap or not accurate. We
are set to implement it in a way that is affordable and accurate to use in real world
applications. After the initial setup by the farmer, apart from the general maintenance
no farmer intervention is required. Image recognition techniques helps in improving real
time performance to a large extent

References

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[1] H. Gan and W.S.Lee,: Development of a Navigation system for a smart Farm, IFAC-
Papers Online Volume 51, Issue 17, 2018, Pages 1-4

[2]. Auat Cheein, F.A., Carelli, R.: Agricultural robotics: unmanned robotic service units in
agricultural tasks. IEEE Ind. Electron. Mag.7(3), 48–58 (2013)

[3]. Cariou, C., Lenain, R., Thuilot, B., Berducat, M.: Automatic guidance of a four-wheel-
steering mobile robot for accurate field operations. J. Field Robot.26(6–7), 504–518
(2009)

[4]. Christiansen, P., Nielsen, L.N., Steen, K.A., Jørgensen, R.N., Karstoft, H.: Deep
Anomaly : combining background subtraction and deep learning for detecting obstacles
and anomalies in an agricultural field. Sensors 16(11), 1904 (2016)

[5]. Eaton, R., Katupitiya, J., Siew, K.W., Howarth, B.: Autonomous farming: modeling
and control of agricultural machinery in a unified framework. In: Proceedings of 15th
International Conference on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice, pp. 499–504
(2008)

[6]. García-Pérez, L., García-Alegre, M.C., Ribeiro, A., Guinea, D.: An agent of behaviour
architecture for unmanned control of a farming vehicle. Comput. Electron. Agric.60(1),
39–48 (2008)

[7]https://www.nanalyze.com/2018/12/autonomous-tractors-self-driving-farm-
equipment/

[8](https://www.fastcompany.com/90272045/the-7-technologies-that-will-make-
farming-smarter-and-more-productive )

[9]T. Bozik and G. Gurkan, "An Arduino UNO application: GPS guided unmanned ground
vehicle," 2017 10th International Conference on Electrical and Electronics Engineering
(ELECO), Bursa, 2017, pp. 852-855.