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Satellite Driven Farming Equipment
ravenousbugblatter writes "An article at CNN discusses how Australian scientists are using GPS to automatically drive tractors and other farming equipment on predetermined tracks. The technology is encouraged because it can prevent water loss associated with the repeated compaction of soil from heavy farming equipment."
Couldn't the same thing be achived by simply not driving in the ruts?
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I was looking at this, and despite the funny jokes about a redneck skynet, and all hail the rise of the john deer overlords, I do have a couple serious questions.
In kansas a lot of the farmed land in the north western parts of kansas is non-uniform. People tend to have this idea of kansas as being a flat area, but the land is actually quite hilly in the western parts.
What happens if a tractor slips or loses traction? Or do the tractors simply not operate when it is muddy? How much error detection and fixiing do these tractors have. What happens if it finds itself on a part of a field it shouldnt be on, IE its transmitter goes out for a short period of time due to electrical disturbance (say freak lightning or something else).
Does the tractor drive across tilled land to get back to the spot (possibly destroying crops) or does it know to re-orient itself, drive along the right path, and then proceed about its task.
What happens if there is a hardware failure, is it possible to set a new tractor right where the last one set off, or does it need to go through the entire process again?
these things werent answered very well in the article, but are very obvious questions i think that should pop up to someone who read the article.
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I took a course in surveying a couple years ago at university; the US gov't has a masking signal they can apply to gps satellites to give purposely inaccurate data. It essentially changes the coordinate values by a random number, and the results can put you out by as much as 200 m. As soon as this signal was switched off, you were good to a mere couple meters. I don't, however, know how they're getting accuracy to less than an inch.
Fortunately, Kangaroos are already equiped with a collision detection and avoidance subsystem sufficient for avoiding slow moving objects like farm implements.
Children and Pets, however may not be.