Evaluation of automatically steered agricultural vehicles

The popularization of automatic guidance systems for off-road vehicles, especially in agricultural environments, has led to a sudden affluence of commercial solutions. As a consequence, end users are often overwhelmed by the spread of possibilities commercially available, on top of the confusion provoked by the guidance accuracy advertised by manufacturers. Therefore, there is a need for a methodology that objectively quantifies the level of performance of any auto-steering system, classifying different solutions according to their accuracy and reliability. This paper describes a method to evaluate the behavior of any automatically driven agricultural vehicle traveling along paths of any curvature. The proposed technique was verified in a self-propelled forage harvester, and field results are presented and compared with those found when the harvester was evaluated with conventional regression analysis.