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The article presents information about the third annual field robot event, organized earlier this year by Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The main task of robots entered in this global competition was to follow straight and curved rows in a corn crop, make a turn at the headland, and continue on to the next row. The performance of the robots at the second annual event in 2004 showed marked improvement over the first contest in 2003, where the majority of the teams failed to follow straight rows. The difference between 2004 and 2005 was not remarkable, but the tasks were more difficult this year as parts of the corn rows, up to 1 m, were missing, and the robots had to skip one row each time and count corn plants. Most teams were students from European universities, but professional teams from research institutes and industry participated as well. Last year, a team from the U.S. participated, and this year, a team from Japan. Each team designs and builds a robot complete with chassis, controller, drive, sensors, and navigation strategy. |
