Precision Guidance of Agricultural Tractors for Autonomous Farming

The agricultural industry is undergoing significant cultural shifts at present and will continue to do so into the future. These shifts have come about due to the emergence of more 'corporate' style farming, where declines in the labour workforce and increased emphasis on global competition, means a demand for increased efficiency and productivity in farming operations. Such a demand in turn lends itself to so called Precision Autonomous Farming (PAF). This paper presents ongoing work and progress in implementing a Systems Engineering approach to agricultural automation. An overview of the farming system is presented, depicting a system-of-system architecture. Each sub-system is described in more detail, and include the crop layout system, the software system, and the precision autonomous agricultural machinery system. Such autonomous machinery is used for seeding, crop sensing, harvesting, weeding and other follow-up operations. The authors propose the development and ongoing management of a Precision Farming Data Set (PFDS) formed off-line before crop cultivation, and used to achieve optimal performance of the farming system by specifying the spatial precision required for agricultural operations. Preliminary results are shown, highlighting the development and use of a fully instrumented tractor for use in agricultural operations, as well as initial research into developing high level path tracking controller for such machinery.