Intelligent guidance for agricultural machinery using advanced satnav

Smart farming aims to steer tractors with centimeter-accuracy to improve farming and the environment. Navtronics, a Belgium ESA Business Incubation Centre start-up company, is tailoring intelligent guidance for agricultural machinery using advanced satnav. As any other industry, the agriculture sector is always looking for ways to raise productivity and reduce labor cost through new technologies. One is the use of high-end Real Time Kinematic (RTK) satellite navigation to steer and control tractors and implements. RTK satnav increases the precision of positional data derived from the Galileo, GPS and Glonass navigation satellite constellations. By using the ‘phase’ information of the signal’s carrier wave, rather than just the satnav signal content, and combining this with a reference station for real-time corrections, Navtronics’ systems can provide up to centimeter-level accuracy. This accuracy far exceeds manual steering, resulting in better use of available land and higher productivity from human and machine. By ‘automating’ farm machinery, even unskilled drivers can achieve near-perfect results. The precision also avoids the double spraying of pesticides or even eliminates the need for pesticides altogether through mechanical weeding on organic farms – clearly better for the environment. The Navtronics BVBA development of hard- and software solutions for automated agricultural guidance systems is being done with the support of ESA Technology Transfer Programme’s Business Incubation Centre Flanders. The company is a spin-off from SBG Precision Farming in the Netherlands.