Review of research on automatic guidance of agricultural vehicles

A review of the recent research in agriculture vehicle automatic guidance is presented in this paper, focusing on the position measurement, agriculture models and path tracking. There are 2 main problems to be solved in the agriculture vehicle guidance system. The first one is the measurement of the agriculture vehicle's working conditions, such as its position, heading, speed and wheel angle, among which the most important is the position measurement. There are 2 kinds of position measurement methods: One is the relative method, such as measuring the vehicle's position relative to a guidance baseline based on machine vision; the other is the absolute method, such as measuring the vehicle's absolute position on the earth based on the Global Navigation Satellite System. As it takes into account of the change of the vehicle's dynamic characteristics with the external environment and the farm implements, it makes the control algorithms more robust.