Human-Following Control in Furrow For Agricultural Support Robot

In Japan, the reduction in agricultural work population and increase in abandoned cultivated land are major social issues. To overcome these issues, we have proposed a small agricultural robot that supports the transportation of harvested crops while it follows the user. To move in the furrowed field, ridges and furrows where the robot can move must be detected using robot-mounted sensors and follow the ridge while avoiding the ridges and crop rows. However, when the robot follows the user ahead of it, it has difficulty detecting the ridges because of occlusion by the user. In addition, the robot requires to follow the user and move in and out of furrows of different widths in the farm field. To achieve smooth and safe harvesting support in the field with different width furrows, we propose a method for ridge detection and tracking by measuring the furrow width and interpolation using an RGB-D camera and a method for human-following control while avoiding ridges according to the ridge observation state using fuzzy set theory. To verify the proposed methods, experiments in the farm are carried out.