Tracking footprints for agricultural applications: a low cost lidar approach

Abstract

International audienceThe accuracy of a mobile robot is an important topic, which is subjected to an important attention. It is particularly crucial when considering off-road applications such as agricultural robot, since it rises questions for both localization and control. A possible way to avoid the use of expensive sensors (such as RTK-GPS) or building specific landmarks, lies in the exploitation of tire footprints, let in the soil by previous actions achieved manually or autonomously. These footprints are particularly detectable by several kind of sensors. This paper presents a method for tracking footprints with a low cost lidar sensor. The proposed way is to detect an expected footprint template and then aggregate successive detections to construct a 3D map. This map finally permit to compute a control law for path tracking regarding mobile robot position compared with footprint location