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Farmer Wins Award For Self-Driving Tractor System (Jan 21, 2016)
Farmer Matt Reimer of Reimer Robotics was named the winner of the Best New Invention Award at this year's Inventor's Showcase at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon.
Matt who farms near Kilarney, Manitoba has designed an autonomous steering system that drives the tractor with out a person driving it and instructions can be sent wirelessly.
"It's really autosteer that got me thinking about all this," he said. "We can already drive our tractors in straight lines, so why can't I just tell my tractor where to go and have it go there."
Reimer took the auto-pilot out of a radio-controlled drone and installed it in his tractor, which he uses to pull a grain cart at harvest.
"We were able to get more done in fall, we were harrowing and swathing at the same time as we were combining and that guy was doing errands and going for fuel," he said. "We actually had our most productive fall ever."
Here is a video overview that Matt prepared showing the system in operation.
The tractor pulling the grain cart in the video has no one in the cab. It is controlled by an open source autopilot it can operate autonomously all day in the field without a driver. I can't take credit for every bit of hardware and software used but I did put it all together.
Thanks to everyone who has put time and energy into Pixhawk, Mavproxy, Mavlink, DroneAPI, MissionPlanner, APM Rover, and all the great documentation that goes along with those. I couldn't have done it without you! Sorry if I missed anything, or anyone.
In the video I mention that the tractor comes a little close to the combine and I attribute this to it being dusk (time of day when gps often does funny things) I am totally wrong about this being the cause of the problem, it is a thing though. I swath my fields with autosteer and I always set the direction either EW or NS, East West in this case. Then when I get to the field with the combine I can use the autosteer on the combine to follow the swath. Because gps can vary a bit the combine has a feature called "nudge" basically if you see that the combine is drifting a bit you can nudge the autosteer right or left. I didn't have my combine set to exactly the same width as my swather so over the course of the day I kept nudging it in one direction as I moved across the field. I clued in when I realized that I was having to move the grain cart the same amount away from the combine that the value of "nudge" had crept up too. I can't believe it but I checked and rechecked this behavior and it seems that when you use the nudge feature on the combine autosteer it adds some offset to the gps coordinates and then outputs the modified coordinates through the nmea serial connection which I feed into my laptop that ultimately determines where the cart will be relative to the combine. Now that I know this is how it works I can work around it but I think this has got to be a bug in the software in my combine, the nmea serial output should be the unadulterated gps position, at least in my opinion.
Farmer Wins Award For Self-Driving Tractor System (Jan 21, 2016)
Farmer Matt Reimer of Reimer Robotics was named the winner of the Best New Invention Award at this year's Inventor's Showcase at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon.
Matt who farms near Kilarney, Manitoba has designed an autonomous steering system that drives the tractor with out a person driving it and instructions can be sent wirelessly.
"It's really autosteer that got me thinking about all this," he said. "We can already drive our tractors in straight lines, so why can't I just tell my tractor where to go and have it go there."
Reimer took the auto-pilot out of a radio-controlled drone and installed it in his tractor, which he uses to pull a grain cart at harvest.
"We were able to get more done in fall, we were harrowing and swathing at the same time as we were combining and that guy was doing errands and going for fuel," he said. "We actually had our most productive fall ever."
Here is a video overview that Matt prepared showing the system in operation.
The tractor pulling the grain cart in the video has no one in the cab. It is controlled by an open source autopilot it can operate autonomously all day in the field without a driver. I can't take credit for every bit of hardware and software used but I did put it all together.
Thanks to everyone who has put time and energy into Pixhawk, Mavproxy, Mavlink, DroneAPI, MissionPlanner, APM Rover, and all the great documentation that goes along with those. I couldn't have done it without you! Sorry if I missed anything, or anyone.
In the video I mention that the tractor comes a little close to the combine and I attribute this to it being dusk (time of day when gps often does funny things) I am totally wrong about this being the cause of the problem, it is a thing though. I swath my fields with autosteer and I always set the direction either EW or NS, East West in this case. Then when I get to the field with the combine I can use the autosteer on the combine to follow the swath. Because gps can vary a bit the combine has a feature called "nudge" basically if you see that the combine is drifting a bit you can nudge the autosteer right or left. I didn't have my combine set to exactly the same width as my swather so over the course of the day I kept nudging it in one direction as I moved across the field. I clued in when I realized that I was having to move the grain cart the same amount away from the combine that the value of "nudge" had crept up too. I can't believe it but I checked and rechecked this behavior and it seems that when you use the nudge feature on the combine autosteer it adds some offset to the gps coordinates and then outputs the modified coordinates through the nmea serial connection which I feed into my laptop that ultimately determines where the cart will be relative to the combine. Now that I know this is how it works I can work around it but I think this has got to be a bug in the software in my combine, the nmea serial output should be the unadulterated gps position, at least in my opinion.
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