Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-Road Vehicles

Rapid developments in electronics over the past two decades have induced a move from purely mechanical vehicles to mechatronics design. Recent advances in computing, sensors, and information technology are pushing mobile equipment design to incorporate higher levels of automation under the novel concept of intelligent vehicles. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles introduces this concept, and provides an overview of recent applications and future approaches within this field. Several case studies present real examples of vehicles designed to navigate in off-road environments typically encountered by agriculture, forestry, and construction machines. The examples analyzed describe and illustrate key features for agricultural robotics, such as automatic steering, safeguarding, mapping, and precision agriculture applications. The eight chapters include numerous figures, each designed to improve the reader’s comprehension of subjects such as: • automatic steering systems; • navigation systems; • vehicle architecture; • image processing and vision; and • three-dimensional perception and localization. Mechatronics and Intelligent Systems for Off-road Vehicles will be of great interest to professional engineers and researchers in vehicle automation, robotics, and the application of artificial intelligence to mobile equipment; as well as to graduate students of mechanical, electrical, and agricultural engineering.

Francisco Rovira Más is an associate professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain. After receiving his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he joined the Intelligent Vehicle Systems group of Deere and Company in Moline and Urbandale, USA, between 2003 and 2005. His research interests are autonomous vehicles; machine vision with special emphasis in stereoscopic vision; off-road equipment automation and controls; field robotics; and artificial intelligence.

Qin Zhang is a professor, senior scientist and senior automation engineer at Washington State University, Prosser, USA. He received his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research interests are automated and autonomous agricultural machinery technologies; intelligent agricultural machinery controls; on-machinery crop health sensing technologies; machinery-area network technologies; and agricultural infotronics technologies.

Alan C. Hansen is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, USA. He received his PhD in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. His research areas are diesel engine and tractor performace; biofuels and diesel engine combustion; simulation modeling of in-field grain handling systems; and machine vision.