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Waypoint Generation for Autonomous Navigation of an Agricultural EV Robot

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  2026 ASABE Annual International Meeting  2601373.(doi:10.13031/aim.202601373)
Authors:   Yuan Zhang, James Y. Kim
Keywords:   autonomous navigation, EV robot, waypoint generation, RTK-GPS, orthomosaic.

Abstract. Row-crop agriculture faces increasing labor shortages, driving demand for affordable autonomous navigation solutions on ground robots. Existing approaches typically require manual path teaching via driven GPS traces. To avoid prior field traversal, an interactive waypoint generation system featuring a graphical interface is presented; it accepts a geo-referenced orthomosaic image, transforms pixel coordinates to the robot‘s positions, and exports waypoints to the robot. The system allows a manual serpentine path generation and also supports an automatic mode to generate waypoints by detecting crop rows via vegetation pixel analysis. Paths generated by the system can be deployed at any field by repositioning the base station without changes to the exported file. Applied to a soybean research field orthomosaic, the automatic mode detected 9 swaths and produced 16,063 waypoints. The system eliminates the manual teaching step for potential field operations including weed management and crop scouting.

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