The Hands Free Hectare team at Harper Adams University in Shropshire — Martin Abell, Kit Franklin and Jonathan Gill — has successfully got over the first major hurdle of its project: ‘drilling’ a one-hectare site with a self-driving tractor.
The project aims to be the first in the world to plant, tend and harvest a crop using only autonomous vehicles.
The drilling operation, which took 6hr, was undertaken by a tractor that the team only received in December and then made autonomous. The drilling came after the application of herbicide, which the tractor also completed successfully using a GPS-controlled precision sprayer developed for the project.
Martin Abell from Precision Decisions, the project’s industry partner, said: “The tractor is able to navigate the hectare using an autopilot system for drones.
“This allows it to follow a pre-determined path in the field. It runs entirely on GPS and follows the requested route, making its way between waypoints; these are digital GPS markers — created using our software — that we have positioned at the ends of the field for the tractor to navigate to.
“It is akin to a more-advanced version of dot-to-dot. Our waypoints for the drilling also incorporated lifting and lowering signals that picked the drill up at one end and placed it back down, once it had turned around.”
Kit Franklin, agricultural engineering lecturer at Harper Adams University (and project leader), said: “Although the system sounds very technical at the moment, and a lot of work has gone into making it work, we do hope that systems based on this concept will exist in the future.
“They will be easy to use, only requiring a farmer to input their requirement to a computer, then leave the robotic vehicles to go off and do it.
“In order to achieve this, there will be a vast opportunity for careers in the agricultural engineering sector, which will be very rewarding and exciting. Those people will be changing agricultural machinery, as we currently know it.”
The third member of the team, Jonathan Gill, is a robotics researcher.