Abstract—
This letter presents an automated roadside mowing agent.
A proof-of-concept testbed was developed based on a lowcost sensor array selected for quick, efficient, and effective roadside mowing.
Dead reckoning from shaft-mounted encoders is fused via an extended Kalman filter with absolute positioning and heading
information provided by a dual-antenna differential (wide area augmentation system-corrected) global positioning system (GPS) unit, to obtain accurate localization. The dual GPS unit, which includes an integrated gyro, provides accurate drift-free heading,yielding a low-cost high-performance solution. Outdoor tests on grassy and uneven terrain illustrate the success and practicality of the proposed agent. Mowing performance was evaluated based on consistency of consecutive mowing paths: 10.0 cm consistency is attainable. Slow-moving drift inherent in GPS positioning does not substantially affect automated mowing performance, which depends more on positioning precision than accuracy.
Index Terms—Global positioning system (GPS), Kalman filtering, mobile robots, road transportation.