ABSTRACT
Intelligent machinery for precision agriculture Qin Zhang, Washington State University, USA; Joseph Dvorak, University of Kentucky, USA; and Timo Oksanen, Aalto University, Finland
1 Introduction
2 Automated guidance systems: overview and global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-based systems
3 Automated guidance systems: vision-based systems
4 Path planning
5 Automated actuation systems
6 Implement controls
7 Future trends: increasingly autonomous systems and their potential impacts
8 Where to look for further information
9 References
Invented in the early 1980s in the United States, precision crop production technology divides a large field into a number of smaller management zones. Field operations in each zone are performed in response to the inter-and intra-field variability in soils or crops to achieve optimized returns on inputs while preserving resources. Performing field operations precisely to achieve better crop growth is not a new concept. For thousands of years, our ancestors manually exercised very small area-based, if not plant-based, precise farming practices in response to actual crop growth at each location. The innovative core of modern precision agriculture is the use of agricultural machinery to perform precise responsive field operations in mechanized precision crop production.
