Development of an automatically guided rice transplanter using RTK-GNSS and IMU

The objective of this research was to develop an automatically guided rice transplanter by using RTK-GNSS and IMU as navigation sensors. The rice transplanter used in this research was commercially available and manually-operated. Automatic operation mechanisms were developed instead of manual functions including turning, stop, going forward and reverse. Sensor fusion was used to integrate measurements by sensors and calculate the absolute heading direction of the rice transplanter. A headland turning method was proposed to ensure the turning process in considering that a relatively large slip rate at extreme steering angles. Experiments were conducted to verify the performance of the automatically guided rice transplanter. Results showed that lateral and heading errors were less than 10 cm and 5 degrees, respectively, in terms of straight paths. And headland turns were automatically executed according to the desired pattern.