Implementation of a four-wheel drive agricultural mobile robot for crop/soil information collection on the open field

Abstract

This paper elaborates the implementation of a new four-wheel drive agricultural mobile robot for open field crop/soil information collection. As most existing agricultural mobile robots share the same platforms with industry mobile robots or commercial research robots, agricultural mobile robots greatly suffer from improper shape and insufficient trafficability. To tackle this problem, the new robot is endowed with compact structure and powerful engines. It has 4 driving wheels equipped with in-wheel motors and two steering motors connected to steering gears. An industrial personal computer is employed to control both the driving motors and steering motors, through 4 motion drivers and 1 Arduino chip respectively. To make the robot move coordinately, a steering angle estimation model for front/rear wheel pairs and an optimal linear velocity generation strategy for four wheels are proposed. Simulations and experiments were conducted to verify the mobility of it.