Autonomous Crop Sprayer 1996

This autonomous vehicle demonstrated in here in 1996 was our first venture into outdoor machine vision for field crops. The vehicle was based on a small hydrostatically driven toolframe tractor that we converted to drive by wire. It featured a near infra-red camera, odometry, inertial sensors and a solid state compass. It did not include GPS as were making the point that if you wished to treat plants with precision you did not need to know your global position. The machine was programmed to follow crop rows and perform alternate left and right headland turns once it had detected the end of the crop rows. Between the main wheels it was equipped with an array of closely spaced individually switchable spray nozzles allowing the machine to act as a large ink jet printer. In this video the machine has been programmed to spray only the individual cauliflower plants. This project provided the starting point for our subsequent more commercially orientated work on intelligent vision guided tractor mounted implements.