LiDAR Point-Cloud Odometer Based Mobile Robot Routine Tracking in Orchards

With the rapid growth of aged population and the development of urbanization in China, the shortage of labor force in agricultural industry becomes an emergency problem. Enhancing the upgrade of agricultural machinery with automatic technologies is the only choice for future sustainable agriculture. Agricultural robots have advantages in precise operations and are important components of automatic agricultural machinery. Autonomous navigation is the basic function for agricultural mobile robots. We propose a center line tracking solution for the mobile robots in orchard, which employs LiDAR odometer to carry the positioning task and PID algorithm to implement the line tracking control task. Experiments are conducted in the practical orchard scenarios. The experimental results show that our solution can give good center line tracking performance, with a maximum localization error of 0.037 meters after marching 10 meters, mean lateral tracking deviation of 0.016 meters and mean orientation deviation of 2.505 degrees.