Sensor Development for Agricultural Vehicle Guidance

The potential exists for significantly reducing operating costs by minimizing missing and overlap in successive agricultural field operations, particularly in areas where the equipment is pull-behind and widths of over fifteen meters are common.

This paper reports on the development of a sensor, consisting of a video camera and image processing system, to detect the location of the demarcation line between tilled-and-untilled soil and cut-and-standing crop. The development of hardware and software to achieve real-time operation under a variety of crop, soil and ambient lighting conditions is described.