was seven years old and destined to become a farmer when my father died. His death initiated the first major change in the direction my life was to take. My father had established himself as a successful farmer with a farm on the banks of the Snake River in eastern Oregon. It was close to heaven, with hills to climb and explore, a river for fishing, a field for hunting, and a friendly shepherd ...

Reports from the Nebraska Tractor Test Laboratory (NTTL) show improved fuel efficiency during the past 20 years. A 4.8% decrease in average annual specific volumetric fuel consumption for the data used in theASAE Standards was shown. Using fuel consumption and power data from the NTTL reports, new equations for fuel consumption were established that predict fuel consumption for diesel engines d...

A new method is described that can be used to decompose human controlled agricultural operations into an autonomous tractor. Four main levels of subsumption have been identified: Operation, Task, Optimisation and Primitive Actions where each level is subsumed by the level above. Tasks were classified into two distinctive roles, deterministic tasks that can be planned and optimised before the op...

A tractor-trailer robot consists of a carlike tractor towing a passive trailer. Due to its highly nonholonomic nature, the kinematics of this type of robot are complicated and di cult to compute. We present exact closed-form solutions for the kinematic parameters of a tractortrailer robot and use them to construct an exact and e cient motion planner in the absence of obstacles. This local plann...

Based on the analysis of the structure and the power transmission system of aircraft towing tractor, a new project applying hydraulic drive hybrid power is put forward considering the requirements of towing aircraft and working process without towbar. As the testing and controlling signals of the system are multi channel and distributed, the testing program is designed via LXI bus. The experime...

In this paper a new leader-follower formation of nonholonomic mobile robots is studied. The follower is a car-like vehicle and the leader is a tractor pulling a trailer. The leader moves along assigned trajectories and the follower is to maintain a desired distance and orientation to the trailer. A sliding mode control scheme is proposed for asymptotically stabilizing the vehicles to a time-var...

In a classical approach to damage diagnosis, the technical condition of an analyzed machine is identified based on the measured symptoms, such as performance, thermal state or vibration parameters. In wheeled tractor the fundamental importance has monitoring and diagnostics during exploitation concerning technical inspection and fault element localizations. The main functions of a diagnostic sy...

The objective of the research is to develop a robot farming system using multiple robots. The research will discuss the application of multiple robots in Japan agriculture for rice, wheat and soybean. The robot farming system includes a rice planting robot, a seeding robot, a robot tractor, a combine robot harvester and various implements attached on the robot tractor. One of the key elements o...

The driving speed of modern tractors increased within last years up to 60 km/h. Together with the driving speed, the safety and comfort requirements are increasing as well. Since modern agricultural tractors still don’t have a rear axle suspension, their driving dynamics behaviour can become critical at certain situations. To be able to predict such critical situations, a multibody model of a t...