Agricultural Vehicle Path Alignment for Irregular Field Boundaries
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Solution Overview
Problem
Automated agricultural vehicles face challenges in aligning with field boundaries, especially when boundaries have unknown orientations or irregular edges, leading to offset errors and requiring precise user input.
Innovation Solution
The system automatically detects edges of a field boundary, analyzes their suitability for generating vehicle paths, and presents them to the user for selection on a simple interface, allowing for quick and easy generation of aligned vehicle paths.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If automated vehicles follow traditional parallel track paths, then productivity is improved through efficient field coverage, but alignment precision with irregular field boundaries deteriorates causing offset errors
Solution Approach 1:
The path generation system dynamically adapts parallel track paths to match irregular field boundaries by calculating optimized track orientations and positions based on boundary geometry, allowing the system to maintain both productivity and precision for fields with unknown orientations or irregular shapes
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes key path parameters including track orientation angles, track spacing distances, and turn radius values to optimize vehicle paths for specific field boundary characteristics, enabling accurate alignment while maintaining efficient field coverage
2Manufacturing precision
If precise user input is required for path generation, then path alignment accuracy is improved, but ease of operation deteriorates due to complex input requirements
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs self-alignment by automatically detecting field boundaries and generating optimized parallel track paths without requiring precise manual user input, achieving both high alignment accuracy and ease of operation through automated boundary adaptation
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary boundary detection and path calculation operations before vehicle execution, pre-processing field geometry data to generate ready-to-follow paths that eliminate the need for complex real-time user input during operation
3Reliability
If vehicles make frequent turns and passes to cover irregular fields, then complete field coverage is achieved, but productivity deteriorates due to increased non-productive time
Solution Approach 1:
The system dynamically optimizes turn radius and track spacing based on field boundary geometry to minimize the number of turns and passes required for complete field coverage, reducing non-productive time while ensuring reliable coverage of irregularly shaped fields
Data Source
AI summary
Systems, apparatus, articles of manufacture, and methods are disclosed to generate automated agricultural vehicle paths by receiving an indication of a field to be worked, obtaining boundary data of the field, determining edges of the boundary, analyzing the edges for a suitability of working the field, presenting edges in order of suitability, and generating an automated vehicle path for an automated vehicle to perform an agricultural function along.