The increasing demand for high-density soil data, and the high labor cost associated with manual methods, have encouraged the development of autonomous alternatives. In this study, a mobile robot named ‘AgTracker’ was developed as a platform for an autonomous soil sampling machine. The robot, equipped with a low-accuracy GPS, a LIDAR scanner, an electronic compass visited human-defined locations through its auto-navigation system. This system also had a user-friendly interface, which enabled operators to set waypoints by clicking on Google Maps®. Locations could also be remotely monitored in real time through this interface. An Xbee wireless network was built to make the remote waypoints set up and monitoring possible.
The robot was tested on campus of University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It could visit waypoints one by one successfully in most cases. The robot’s localization errors, which were the distances between its true visited locations and set waypoints, were evaluated. An average error within 0.2 m was achieved.
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