Through the use of a virtual tractor-trailer link model, vehicle following capabilities have been implemented without the need of communications links between the two vehicles or the installation of special road infrastructure. The principle is based on the modeling of an off-hooked trailer system as a software link between the lead and led vehicles. The leader vehicle is modeled as the tractor...

The experiment was planned to investigate the tractor mounted N-sensor (Make Yara International) to predict nitrogen (N) for wheat crop under different nitrogen levels. It was observed that, for tractor mounted N-sensor, spectrometers can scan about 32% of total area of crop under consideration. An algorithm was developed using a linear relationship between sensor sufficiency index (SIsensor) a...

Power tillers are very simple and versatile machines with large scale diffusion in developing countries, where they are commonly used both for agriculture and for transportation purposes. A new integrated participatory approach that makes use of and improves local end-users knowledge has been used to design a new robotic system for humanitarian demining applications in Sri Lanka, using power ti...

Constant rise in fuel price in recent times has caused manufacturers of heavy commercial vehicles (HCV) to turn to efficient aerodynamic design of trucks, wagons, tractors as well as trailers. The comparative analysis in this study compares the coefficient of drag of the following four aerodynamic configurations of a tractor-trailer combination: 1. Semi-trailer with no devices. 2. Semi-trailer ...

This paper presents an adaptive steering controller for achieving consistent, sensitive, and accurate steering control with noisy and drifting control signals on an automated agricultural tractor. Conventional model-based PID controller is difficult to solve this problem because of too many disturbances and unknown factors. The authors have developed an adaptive steering controller consisting o...

We describe the successful application of a SLICOT subroutine in a control engineering problem. Based on GPS data it is possible to automatically steer farm vehicles along a prescribed trajectory. The bottleneck for the successful on-line implementation of a LQG regulator is the numerical solution of a discrete-time algebraic Riccati equation in real-time and at high accuracy. This is achieved ...

Historically, the purpose of farm safety and health educational materials and programs has been to persuade, convince or educate farmers, members of their families, and hired employees to voluntarily engage in safe behavior during farm or nonfarm work activities (Murphy, 1992). Increasingly, authors have noted that traditional farm safety educational programs have been relatively ineffective (A...