Programming plantation lines on driverless tractors

Abstract

Recent advances in Agricultural Engineering include image processing, robotics and geographic information systems (GIS). Some tasks are still accomplished manually, like drawing plantation lines that optimize productivity. Herewith we present an algorithm to find the optimal plantation lines in linear time. The algorithm is based upon classical results of Geometry which enabled a source code with only 573 lines. We have implemented it in Matlab for sugar cane, and it can be easily adapted to other crops like coffee, maize and soy.