Path planning in advance to help with agricultural emissions and time management

Abstract

Regardless of the job, the saying 'well planned is half done' holds true. It is well known that in Finland, the agricultural season in spring and autumn is short and there is no extra time to spare. Therefore, it is good to prepare and plan the work in advance. Autopilot has been available for work machines for about ten years, but route planning programs are just making their entrance. Autopilot in itself does not save time unless it is more precise than a human or follows a faster route. With RTK correction, centimeter-accurate steering is achieved, which eliminates overlapping driving, but the routes can still be suboptimal. In the Smart Agriculture project in Tarvaala, we compared how much time is saved by pre-optimized driving routes compared to manually driven ones. The routes were created in the spring, outside the season, and on the conventional side, the same paths as always were driven, meaning the longest possible swath. The work phase was sowing and fertilization, and the plot was a rectangular 8-hectare block belonging to the project. The work phases were recorded in a task file, and from both halves, all breaks over 30 seconds, which we assumed were due to human reasons such as breaks and machine checks, were removed. The experiment revealed that the time saved by pre-created routes was 17% compared to the traditional way of driving. The field was familiar to the driver in advance. Even if one considers the time spent creating the routes, about 10 minutes, the savings are regained the following year when the routes do not change, as long as the field remains the same shape. Different routes can, of course, be created for different work phases, such as sowing routes at a 45-degree angle to the sowing tillage. Temporal savings also bring other benefits such as lower emissions through reduced total consumption and improved driver well-being through reduced working hours.