Cooperation of Two Robot Tractors to Improve Work Efficiency

Many efforts have been made by engineers in advanced countries to reduce labor and work time in agriculture due to the decreasing agricultural labor forces. Global demand for higher productivity in agriculture field has led to the need for more cooperation between agricultural machines. Advances in industrial mechanization and automation have inspired engineers todevelop robots that can perform various agriculture field tasks. There are two major categories of research on agricultural robotics: ground sensing systems that use machine vision, odometers, accelerometers, etc. and satellitebased system that use GPS for navigation. The error in accuracy of a real-time kinematic (RTK) GPS system is now only 1 to 2 cm per 10 km. Generally, the error in accuracy of a guidance system using RTK-GPS is 3 to 5 cm.

As for robot technology, many researchers have developed sweep coverage algorithm for multi-agent robot system. The agriculture robottractor is similar to the sweep coverage robot. Both of them need to cover the whole area using the minimum time. The difference between the robot tractor and sweep coverage robot is that the robot tractor need to cover each place only one time.