4 ms·
Does civilian GPS have enough resolution to be useful in a tractor guidance system?
by pmiller2 7y ago
Does civilian GPS have enough resolution to be useful in a tractor guidance system?
- RosanaAnaDana 7y agoRTK does. Also, fields are big and 'generally' there isn't much to hit out there. I think most new harvesters these days are self driving.
- froindt 7y agoThat's true, but if you're spraying a field and veer off by ~12", you're running over corn and killing your profit.
- froindt 7y agoI belive they were enhancing it with terrestrial base stations (Loran-C was mentioned in the discussion, which was 10+ years ago). John Deere has proprietary secret sauce and if I recall correctly, they can get sub 1" accuracy. That precision farming has enabled things like different amounts of fertilizer for different parts of the field, a substantial material savings and improvement for the environment.
- bryik 7y agou-blox's ZED-F9P chip is capable of 10 mm (0.39 inch) accuracy [0]. AFAIK, high accuracy requires being relatively close to a terrestrial correction station. Some states, such as Iowa, run a network of these stations and provide free access to the public [1]. 0 - https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136 https://www.sparkfun.com/products/15136 1 - https://iowadot.gov/rtn/IaRTN-resources/About-the-IaRTN https://iowadot.gov/rtn/IaRTN-resources/About-the-IaRTN
- froindt 7y agoI'm from Iowa but had no idea the DOT ran such a network! Thanks for sharing!
- GlenTheMachine 7y agoNot by itself, in most situations. Maybe if you're automating a combine, where you're doing repeating patterns in a big flat field with no obstacles and where 1 meter deviations from the desired trajectory isn't an issue (not an uncommon situation, but for a lot of use cases you really do care about that 1 meter deviation, e.g. for plowing or cultivating). Otherwise you have to augment, eg with relative GPS or machine vision.