Guidance assistance, autonomous guidance and assisted distance guidance in precision agriculture

The present doctoral thesis analyses the potential of technological advances in electronics, telematics and communications for their application in agriculture. Research has been carried out and some prototypes have been developed in four stages:; In a first phase, it has been carried out the analysis and development of guidance assistance devices. It has been carried out the development of a microcontroller based device which has been patented by the author of this thesis and later, has been developed and commercialized by the company GMV Sistemas.; In a second phase, it has been developed a module of distance guidance which allows the remote driving of an agricultural tractor. There have been made the mechanical modifications in a tractor and the necessary hardware has been installed in order to allow the remote control of the tractor steering. The laptop receives the guidance instructions by means of wireless communication from the computer installed in the base.; In a third phase, there have been developed two autonomous guidance systems, one by means of GPS and the other by means of Computer Vision, using as base the platform developed in the previous phase. It is incorporated a module of path generation from the plot outline. With this trajectory, the tractor is able to do most of the farming work in a plot without the participation of the driver.; The last phase has been developed at the same time than the previous ones and it is located in Precision Agriculture. In this phase it has been carried out the performance of a centrifugal spreader of fertilizer and it has been developed an application for the generation in a precise way of fertilizer maps.; The carried out studies have produced real developments implanted on the machinery of the author's farm. The development of the work has been carried out on a software platform with modules which are intercommunicated between them, because a large part of the developed applications have a common base of work. This modular system allows creating new applications adding new modules and it allows minimizing the development work of the whole of the developed applications.