A Farm Management Information System for Semi-Supervised Path Planning and Autonomous Vehicle Control

Hao Wang, Yaxin Ren and Zhijun Meng
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Hao Wang: Beijing Research Center of Intelligent Equipment for Agriculture, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China
Yaxin Ren: Beijing Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China
Zhijun Meng: Beijing Research Center of Intelligent Equipment for Agriculture, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 13, 1-13

Abstract: This paper presents a farm management information system targeting improvements in the ease of use and sustainability of robot farming systems. The system integrates the functionalities of field survey, path planning, monitoring, and controlling agricultural vehicles in real time. Firstly, a Grabcut-based semi-supervised field registration method is proposed for arable field detection from the orthoimage taken by the drone with an RGB camera. It partitions a complex field into simple geometric entities with simple user interaction. The average Mean Intersection over Union is about 0.95 when the field size ranges from 2.74 ha to 5.06 ha. In addition, a desktop software and a web application are developed as the entity of an FMIS. Compared to existing FMISs, this system provides more advanced features in robot farming, while providing simpler user interaction and better results. It allows clients to invoke web services and receive responses independent of programming language and platforms. Moreover, the system is compatible with other services, users, and devices following the open-source access protocol. We have evaluated the system by controlling 5 robot tractors with a 2 Hz communication frequency. The communication protocols will be publicly available to protentional users.

Keywords: smart agriculture; image segmentation; agricultural robot; field registration (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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