Autonomous Farm-road Traveling of a Robotic Combine Using LiDAR-SLAM

Abstract

　Under agricultural environments with seasonal changes, we validated the accuracy for self-localization using LiDAR-SLAM and demonstrated the autonomous travel of a robot with a harvester along a farm road. Compared with RTK-GNSS as ground truth, the accuracy was 0.4-0.6 m RMSE across all seasons. Furthermore, we used these localization results to implement a path-following control for target paths and speeds and achieved automatic traveling for garage ingress/egress and along a farm road four times. In these driving experiments, the RMSE was 0.21 m for straight driving, 0.81 m for turning, and 0.38 m in whole driving, and the robot's speed was controlled approximately on target.