Autonomous navigation and path planning for agricultural robots

Navigation and path planning are essential technologies for increasing the productivity of agriculture machine systems performing modern precision agriculture tasks. Production agriculture requires efficient methods for complete coverage of agricultural landscapes to complete the critical production steps of preparing the land and planting, managing, and harvesting crops. To help farmers to make the transformation from automated to autonomous systems requires approaches that can leverage the current automation advances from modern precision agricultural machinery and build on them as tools in the development and deployment of agricultural robots. This chapter provides a high-level overview of critical elements in autonomous navigation and path planning and discusses the opportunities and challenges related to building on precision agriculture technologies to enable productive agricultural robots.