CENTIMETER-PRECISION GUIDANCE OF MOVING IMPLEMENTS IN THE OPEN-FIELD - A SIMULATION-BASED ON GPS MEASUREMENTS

High quality and sustainable agricultural production in the open field will be supported by centimetre-precision guidance of agricultural im plements. In this paper, a complete guidance system is proposed and si mulated using real sensor data obtained from a real time kinematic (RT K) differential global positioning system (DGPS). This type of the sat ellite navigation system became available commercially in 1997 and is claimed to reach cm accuracy. It uses real time kinematics to improve the accuracy df a position fix by phase comparison of the carrier sign al. The simulation primarily aims to investigate the accuracy of the g uidance system that can be obtained with RTK DGPS. Using real DGPS mea surement errors the simulated system showed a tracking error less than 0.005 m when the PLD-controller had settled. (C) 1998 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.