Assessment of the cutting performance of a robot mower using custom built software.

Before the introduction of positioning technologies in agriculture practices such as global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), data collection and management were time-consuming and labor-intensive tasks. Today, due to the introduction of advanced technologies, precise information on the performance of agricultural machines, and smaller autonomous vehicles such as robot mowers, can be collected in a relatively short time. The aim of this work was to track the performance of a robot mower in various turfgrass areas of an equal number of square meters but with four dierent shapes by using real-time kinematic (RTK)-GNSS devices, and to easily extract data by a custom built software capable of calculating the distance travelled by the robot mower, the forward speed, the cutting area, and the number of intersections of the trajectories. These data were then analyzed in order to provide useful functioning information for manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and practitioners. The path planning of the robot mower was random and the turfgrass area for each of the four shapes was 135 m2 without obstacles. The distance travelled by the robot mower, the mean forward speed, and the intersections of the trajectories were aected by the interaction between the time of cutting and the shape of the turfgrass. For all the dierent shapes, the whole turfgrass area was completely cut after two hours of mowing. The cutting eciency decreased by increasing the time, as a consequence of the increase in overlaps. After 75 minutes of cutting, the eciency was about 35% in all the turfgrass areas shapes, thus indicating a high level of overlapping

Guide to Residential Landscape Development for Logan, Utah

The \u27\u27Guide to Residential Landscape Development has been written for the Logan City Planning Department as a supplement to the City of Logan Guidelines for Development , a comprehensive planning tool adopted in 1976. The Guide is primarily intended to motivate Logan homeowners in designing, constructing and maintaining their residential properties by pointing out methods of design and construction that : reduce costs of electricity, oil and natura l gas by reducing energy needs Increase property values maximize effective use of the property improve the aesthetic qualities of the homesite The Guide also serves as a prototype of the kind of consumer advocacy tool needed in many cities to help inform private citizens. of the vital role they can play in conserving energy and improving the natural and cultural environment in which they live

Stereo vision and mapping with unsynchronized cameras

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).Environmental awareness is an important prerequisite for autonomous behavior in vehicles. Without it, robots are unable to react to unknown surroundings and require extensive human input for tasks such as target identification and obstacle avoidance. This would negate many of the advantages of having an autonomous system. Giving a vehicle the ability to map its surroundings and use the data effectively will allow humans to spend less time scanning the vehicle's video feed and providing direct navigational commands. This thesis details the development of a real-time, extensible vision and mapping system that provides an interface for control systems to access details of the map. It addresses the problems of image capture, signal noise, and three dimensional map storage. It extends existing real-time stereo mapping systems by tolerating unsynchronized stereo cameras. Results indicate that synchronization allows the system to locate points significantly more accurately than the system without synchronization. When compared with a monocular mapping system, synchronized stereo provides a more detailed map and will tolerate more erroneous localization data. Because it is developed with an abstract localization system, this system is designed to be modular and easily extensible.by Ray C. He.M.Eng