High-Accuracy Position-Aware Robot for Agricultural Automation Using Low-Cost IMU-Coupled Triple-Laser-Guided (TLG) System

• Main Authors: Supod Kaewkorn, Mongkol Ekpanyapong, Ukrit Thamma
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2021-01-01
• Series: IEEE Access
• Subjects: Laser tracking system; localization; inertial measurement unit (IMU); sensor fusion; position control
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9398657/

A novel, low-cost approach to high-accuracy robot localization for agricultural applications using an image-processing triple-laser-guided (TLG) system coupled with an inertial measurement unit (IMU) is presented in this paper. The TLG system consists of a laser-pointing unit (LPU) at the base station and a laser-target unit (LTU) at the mobile robot. The robot&#x2019;s XYZ position and heading are determined from the positions and the angles relative to the field of both LPU and LTU. The robot&#x2019;s roll and pitch are determined by the IMU sensor fusion with complementary filter. The IMU-coupled TLG system is demonstrated on an outdoor, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20 \times 21$ </tex-math></inline-formula> m flat field at various light intensities. The overall lateral and vertical accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are 1.68 cm and 0.59 cm, respectively. The overall heading, roll, and pitch accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are 0.90&#x00B0;, 0.78&#x00B0;, and 0.76&#x00B0;, respectively. The lateral and heading accuracies of the IMU-coupled TLG system are found to be comparable to commercially available GNSS-INS systems from NovAtel and Trimble, while the total cost of the IMU-coupled TLG system is only a fraction of the total cost of the commercially available localization systems.