The practice of bale production, in forage agriculture, involves various machines that include tractors, tedders, rakers, and balers. As part of the baling process, silage material is placed in windrows, linearly raked mounds, to drive over with a baler for easy collection into bales. Traditionally, a baler is an implement that is attached on the back of a tractor to generate bales of a specific shape. Forage agricultural equipment manufacturers have recently released an operator driven, self-propelled round hay baler. This automated platform allows the driver to seamlessly navigate windrows while quickly and easily creating round bales. The current automation control involves the wrapping and releasing the bale, at different orientations, at the push of a button. The next phased plan for the automated baler is to advance it towards full autonomy requiring automatic steering control along windrows to reduce driver fatigue. To support this advancement, we present an innovative low-cost camera-based solution named Synchronized Windrow Intelligent Path Estimator (SWIPE). SWIPE provides a smooth, accurate path along a detected windrow to support seamless autonomous control of the platform under various lighting conditions. It applies advanced sensing, to handle high contrast and low light conditions, combined with artificial intelligence algorithms to predict the center of the windrow out to 10 meters. This presentation describes experimental results of processing two synchronized coplanar cameras to extract the windrow center under challenging off-road conditions. The extracted windrow is used to generate a smooth spline along the center in the presence of gaps, multimodal peaks, and along curves. The developed system does not require additional localization sensing rather is defines the path relative to the sensor’s mounting configuration. In addition to the windrow center, the volume and height characteristics are extracted to distinguish from the underlying ground surface to support baler configurations and adjustments.
