Design and Development of an Autonomous System for Agricultural Tractor

This study describes the design and modification of a tractor for automatic control. The automated system developed for the unmanned tractor was for the purpose of master slave operation in the agricultural sector. In this study, an hydrostatic transmission of the Kubota tractor was selected as the research platform. Modifications were carried out in order to automate the manual control tractor. The automated system was capable to direct the tractor to the target location given by the user. The sensing system guides the tractor to move along the path determined by the controller based on the information from the sensors. The automated system was developed by combining of electromechanical system, multi-sensor integration and control software. The electromechanical system (electrohydraulic and electro-pneumatic) was used to control the gear, brake, steering and accelerator system. The integration of sensors (Ultrasonic sensor, range sensor, magnetic sensor, encoder and potentiometer) provided the surrounding information to the tractor controller. The controller consists of series I/O modules (ICP 17000) and also pair of radio modem for data transmission. The graphical user interface software to control the automated system was developed using the Visual Basic. The automated system developed for ignition, gear, brake, accelerator and steering systems can be control remotely through the use of Graphical User Interface (GUI). The GUI has features, which enable the user to monitor the tractor condition and movement of the tractor by referring to the simulation layer. The simtdation layer consist of pre-determined field map, scaled at lcm: 1m.The simulation movement of the tractor was configured to coordinate with the real tractor movement. The GUI also enables the user to use keyboard to control the tractor movement. The GUI has a capability to calculate the location of the given target location and plan the tractor movement to the target location and assist the tractor to avoid the obstacle in the tractor path.

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