Steer Guidance Of Autonomous Agricultural Robot Based On Pure Pursuit Algorithm And LiDAR Based Vector Field Histogram

Rai  Bijay; Matsa  Amarendra; Datta  Asim

doi:10.6180/jase.202310_26(10).0002

Steer Guidance Of Autonomous Agricultural Robot Based On Pure Pursuit Algorithm And LiDAR Based Vector Field Histogram

Rai Bijay ¹, Matsa Amarendra², and Datta Asim³

¹Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology, Rangpo, Sikkim- 737136, India
²Department of Electrical Engineering, Mizoram University, Mizoram, Aizawl- 796004, India
³Department of Electrical Engineering, India, Tezpur University, Tezpur, Assam-784028, India

Received: March 24, 2022
Accepted: November 5, 2022
Publication Date: January 4, 2023

Copyright The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are cited.

Download Citation: ||https://doi.org/10.6180/jase.202310_26(10).0002

The application of autonomous robots has been increasing in agriculture sector to substitute human labor and to improve the production yields. A self-sufficient robot is intended to accomplish specific jobs in different locations of the working field area, thereby an economical and effective navigation system for differential wheeled mobile robots is a paramount importance. In this paper, an autonomous navigation system of an agricultural mobile robot is proposed using pure pursuit algorithm (PPA) which is also assisted by vector field histogram (VFH). PPA autonomously guides towards waypoints, whereas the VFH algorithm helps the vehicle steer away for obstacles. The 2-dimensional light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors are used to monitor through the VFH algorithm. Minimum number of waypoints are set in PPA for convenience on map setup. Several indicators such as distance covered by robot, number of iterations required for completion of travel, etc., are investigated with the variable settings in PPA algorithm. Result analysis shows that mobile robot can travel at speed range of 2.5-25 km/hr with obstacle evasion which is adequate for agricultural mobile robots.

Keywords: agricultural autonomous robot, vector field histogram (VFH), pure pursuit 33 algorithm, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), obstacle avoidance

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