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47 Agriculture Autonomous systems have been making their way into a range of agricultural applications. For example, Harper Adams University in the UK has worked with York-based Precision Decisions on a project to plant, tend and harvest a crop using only unmanned technology. The ‘Hands Free Hectare’ delivered a yield of 4.5 tonnes of spring barley, against a predicted yield of 5 tonnes using just autonomous ground vehicles with data from UAVs. This showed for the first time that an entire crop can be grown from start to finish without people ever needing to go into the field to work the land. A number of machines were used in the trial. A lightweight Iseki tractor did the spraying, drilling and rolling; the harvesting was then completed using a Sampo combine harvester. UAVs with multi-spectral and RGB colour sensors were used to take aerial images of the field, while a smaller scout vehicle was used to take video at crop level and physically take samples. All the machinery is readily available to farmers. The Iseki and Sampo are common models, while the navigation system came from a UAV and the software was open source. The next stage is to plant and harvest a winter crop. Mowers Autonomous Solutions Inc (ASI) is working with FireFly Automatix on an autonomous mower for the turf farming industry. ASI provides control technology that can be adapted to different applications and platforms, and is working with FireFly to create the M220 self-propelled turf mower. This marks a dramatic shift in turf farming, says David Clyde, ASI’s director of new market development. While harvesting takes place only once a year, the turf needs to be mowed weekly to keep it healthy. The mower has been designed from scratch for this specific application and uses ASI’s command and control software, Mobius, to determine the most efficient route for optimal area coverage of every field. The software platform communicates with and controls each part of the machine, managing its speed, direction, turning radius, obstacle detection, braking and blade height. Mining Mining companies have been using autonomous technologies for ten years now. Vehicle manufacturer Komatsu, for example, has more than 100 autonomous haulage system (AHS) trucks operating in mines in Australia and the Americas. It now plans to accelerate the roll-out of the technology. By the end of 2017, AHS trucks had hauled more than 1.5 billion tonnes of material, and have shown to be far safer than conventional vehicles, where even a small truck-driving error could cause a serious accident. The automatic controls of the AHS also reduce sudden acceleration and abrupt steering, which improves tyre life by 40% over conventional driving. Alongside the huge earth-moving trucks, Komatsu has also developed a retrofit kit that can be mounted on the company’s electric 830E truck, which can carry more than 230 tonnes of rock. This is being rolled out to 29 trucks by mining company Rio Tinto. In addition to offering the retrofit kit on other main models of Komatsu electric trucks, Komatsu is now working on an improved version of the software to allow the autonomous trucks to work in a blended fleet with traditionally driven vehicles. The company is also working with chip developer Nvidia to use graphics processor units on construction sites. The Jetson neural network card will be installed on construction equipment, taking data from stereo cameras on the equipment, as well as on UAVs from Skycatch, a Komatsu partner. UGVs | Insight Unmanned Systems Technology | April/May 2018 The Hands Free Hectare project has shown that crops can be planted and harvested without using human labour (Courtesy of Precision Decisions) Autonomous mower for the turf industry (Courtesy of Firefly Automatix)