A Multifunctional Tracked Vehicle Able to Operate in Vineyards Using GPS and Laser Range-finder Technology

Work in agriculture and in particular in some local sloping vineyards require a great deal of resources and effort. But regular geometry of most vineyards rows can help the automation of some cultivation processes. With the aim to facilitate workers during harvesting, pruning and to carry bins full of bunches of grapes up to the end of the rows, a versatile multifunction electrical vehicle is under development. The vehicle, named U-Go, has been built in order to be used as a multipurpose outdoor vehicle in different applications, so the control electronics have been designed to provide different choices for control modalities. The simplest one is the teleoperated modality. In this situation a remote user, using a joystick, can send direct commands to the robot in order to move forward, backward or turn left or right at different speeds. In order to allow the totally autonomous operations in the vineyards, different sensors were tested. In this work, system test using a Laser Range Finder and a DGPS have been performed using an obstacle avoidance methodology named Potential Field Method (PFM). This algorithm allows the robot to follow a specified trajectory, defined by means of some GPS waypoints, while avoiding unexpected obstacles. This control algorithm has been developed using the Microsoft Development Robotic Studio that allows for code development and simulation for robotics application. Different tests on the U-Go Robot have been performed in order to demonstrate its capabilities on the two different modalities with promising results.