Application of image processing technology for unloading automation of robot combine harvester

Automation of agricultural work has been expected to solve several problems of Japan´s agriculture and help farmers. Now it is becoming a key to keep sustainability of national agricultural production. Thus we are now trying to develop a robot combine harvester. Attempts have been made to develop robot combine harvester. Although a few prototypes can run and automatically harvest rice and wheat, unloading work, in which grains are unloaded through harvester´s auger into a grain container on a truck, has not yet been automated. In this paper, a method using machine vision is presented to position the harvester´s spout at an appropriate point. Experimental results show that this method has sufficient accuracy.