Position errors in sowing in curved and rectilinear routes using autopilot

Abstract

The use of automatic routing significantly increases the yield and quality of agricultural operations and reduces the overlap rates between the mechanized set passes during the operation. The objective of this study was to analyse the quality of peanut sowing using automatic routing in two paths, curved and rectilinear, based on the error of parallelism and execution error, through statistical process control. The maps used came from an area of peanut seed production, in the city of Luzitânia, São Paulo, Brazil. The sowing was carried out by the execution of a project elaborated in CAD software that, for its elaboration, was taken into consideration the working width of the seeder-fertilizer, as well as the spacing of the crop. The CenterPoint RTX signal was used on both routes. The errors were measured in the Agrocad® program, by means of the orthogonal difference between the lines, and the execution errors were calculated based on the difference between the previously projected lines and the lines executed by the tractor. In general, the sowing operation presented better quality in the rectilinear path, providing smaller parallelism and execution errors. The maximum errors of parallelism were 8.75 and 5.22 cm in the curved and rectilinear path, respectively. The RTX signal ensured good quality of operation in rectilinear path, with low probability of errors occurrence above 3.8 cm.