After planting, the actual geospatial location of each transplant was determined by RTK-GPS using a handheld surveying system (Trimble model TCS1) interfaced to a rover RTK-GPS (Trimble model 4700). The GPS coordinate for each plant was obtained by placing the bottom tip of the 2m GPS antenna survey pole against the plant stem at the soil surface and holding
Fig. 4.
Automatically generated crop geoposition map. The map shows the crop plant locations determined by the automatic GPS mapping transplanter during planting (orange triangles). The inset photo shows the manual RTK-GPS survey measurement of the plant location ground truth. The ground truth points (black circles) were overlaid on the automatically generated map for comparison.