Liangliang Yang, Noboru Noguchi
Vehicle Robotics Laboratory, Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, Japan

Robot vehicle is a key technology to solve the problem of descending number of farmers and aging of farmers. It is more than ten years to develop robot vehicles all over the world. A project from 2009 to 2014 funded by MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries) of Japan is going to apply the new developed agricultural robot vehicles in a normal farm. A part of the experiment results of this project related to the robotic management of soybean will be introduced in this article. Two robot vehicles were utilized in the experiments. One was an 83 horse power wheel type robot tractor; the other was a 110 horse power crawler type robot combine. The robotic management included tillage, planting and fertilizing, seeding and pesticide spraying using the robot tractor, while harvesting using the robot combine. The navigation accuracy for both robot tractor and combine was around 0.05 m. The experiment results indicate that the fully robotic management of soybean is possible in the test field.