Abstract
Navigation system is applied in variety of fields including the simple location positioning, autopilot navigation of unmanned robot tractor, autonomous guidance systems for agricultural vehicles, construction of large field works that require high precision and map making process. Particularly utilization of GPS (Global Positioning System) is very common in the present navigation system. This study introduces a navigation system for autonomous field robot that travels to the pre-input path using GPS information. Performance of the GPS- based navigation is highly depended on its receiving rate because GPS receivers do not acquire any navigation information in the period between the refresh intervals. So this study presents an algorithm that improves an accuracy of the navigation by estimation the positional information during the blind period of a low rate GPS receiver. In fact the algorithm calculated the robot's heading in a 50 Hz rate, so the blind period of an 1 Hz GPS receiver is extensively covered. Consequently implementation of the algorithm to the GPS based navigation showed an improvement in guidance accuracy. The conventional field robot directly carried an expensive control computer and sensors onboard, therefore the miniaturization and weight reduction of the robot was limited. In this paper, the field robot carried only communication equipments such as GPS module, normal RC receiver, and bluetooth modem. This enabled the field robot to be built in an economic cost and miniature size.