Low-cost positioning system for agricultural vehicles

Accurate positioning is needed for agricultural vehicles now and in the future. Position is currently needed for mapping, precision farming, auto-steering vehicles and light-bar navigation and in the future for agrorobotic solutions. Although the accuracy of GPS based positioning can be improved using differential or RTK-solutions, such application may be too highly-priced. In this paper tractor positioning with a cheap GPS-receiver is improved by using inertial navigation and odometry. Kalman filtering is used for sensor fusion. In compensation of the bias type slow error in GPS measurements the low cost additional measurements are not sufficient. However, positioning in blind areas of GPS can be done with them.