Vision Based Row Guidance Approach for Navigation of Agricultural Mobile Robots in Orchards

Machine vision plays an important role in the development of agriculture to improve productivity. In the current research, this project plans to develop an automated navigation system that can carry an autonomous vehicle that will travel between rows in the orchard. The system focuses on identifying the straight lines of the tree rows by identifying the center line for robot navigation in garden rows using the Hough Transform and image processing techniques such as morphing, thresholding and edge detection with the Canny operator. The system is intended for outdoor use only as it is designed for garden navigation. MATLAB is the main software used in this project to simulate a visual approach that provides an image processing workspace with different features. The algorithm was then evaluated using several image parks with different characteristics, and the result showed that the proposed method can successfully detect center lines as autonomous vehicle guidance to travel between rows with different tree heights and sizes.