Soil Tillage Quality Measurement: A Methodical Approach

This paper presents a methodical approach for measuring the process quality of the agricultural task soil tillage. This is a crucial step towards the development of automation in the context of autonomous agricultural field work. Therefore, the relevant parameters that define the process quality for autonomous tillage must be identified. These parameters depend on the agricultural task, such as primary tillage, stubble cultivation, or seedbed preparation, and are based on the farmer’s expertise and focus. The quality parameters are the identified set of parameters for each task that indicate the quality of the process. For each individual parameter, the proposed measurement method can be applied. The method involves three basic steps. (1) Different algorithms are implemented to characterize the quality parameter based on, e.g., 3D point cloud data or image data. The algorithms are verified in a deterministic environment, such as a simulation environment or a test bench. (2) Afterwards, the Spearman correlation coefficient of the var-ious parameter metrics is analyzed to cluster the metrics into groups with similar physical properties. ... mehrBased on the clustering, parameters can be chosen considering defined criteria (low resource-intensive, sensor-setup specific, etc.). (3) Finally, the selection of the parameter metric is validated by testing the implementation infield, considering challenging cases, anomalies, and influencing factors such as work-ing speed or soil dependencies. The measurement method for the quality parameter could be used to derive a model that describes the variation of the parameters concerning the degrees of freedom of the agricultural task, e.g. the working speed or working depth for the tillage process.