Determination of Drain-Pipe Length and Control of Moving Machine
In agriculture, road construction, and similar applications of moving machines, precise position in real-time enables a more and more cost-effective workflow. Precision farming with cm accuracy becomes a common procedure in agriculture, and the basis for the entire process management. One special application is the control of drain-pipe laying vehicles in wet fields, and the measurement of drain-pipe length for cost control.
GNS System Requirements
- Measurement of absolute positions with an accuracy of about 0,5 m
- Calculation of drain-pipe length with an accuracy of 0,5 m from the measured positions
- Driver assistance to keep the vehicle in constant parallel distance to the previous drain
- System availability of 95%
- Availability of basic GIS functions in order to assure efficient data management
- Easy software control, to enable operation under harsh field conditions (machine vibration)
Environment
The GNS systems is used on a slow (~ 1km/hr) driving drain-pipe machine on agricultural fields near the German north-sea coast. The GNS equipment has to be resistant against shocks and machine vibrations. GNS signal shadowing and multipath effects are small and occur only at field boundaries. These effects can be neglected in this application. Because of the coastal location of the fields, beacon DGPS corrections are available and are used for position determination
System Structure
Calculations
The length of the drain-pipe is determined with use of the DGPS positions. The pipes can be classified from attributes available in GART-2000®, for example by pipe material. A line parallel to the previous drain is calculated. For machine control, the operator will be guided visually to stay on this parallel. Following the measurement the data can be exported into DXF data format and visualized in a standard CAD software tool.
