LiDAR-Based 3D Scans of Soil Surfaces and Furrows in Two Soil Types

• Main Authors: Frederik F. Foldager, Johanna Maria Pedersen, Esben Haubro Skov, Alevtina Evgrafova, Ole Green
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-02-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: 3D soil surface; microtopography; pinboard; furrow cross-section; trailing shoe; precision agriculture; SICK
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/3/661

Soil surface measurements play an important role in the performance assessment of tillage operations and are relevant in both academic and industrial settings. Manual soil surface measurements are time-consuming and laborious, which often limits the amount of data collected. An experiment was conducted to compare two approaches for measuring and analysing the cross-sectional area and geometry of a furrow after a trailing shoe sweep. The compared approaches in this study were a manual pinboard and a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensor. The experiments were conducted in coarse sand and loamy sand soil bins exposed to three levels of irrigation. Using the LiDAR, a system for generating 3D scans of the soil surface was obtained and a mean furrow geometry was introduced to study the geometrical variations along the furrows. A comparison of the cross-sectional area measurements by the pinboard and the LiDAR showed up to 41% difference between the two methods. The relation between irrigation and the resulting furrow area of a trailing shoe sweep was investigated using the LiDAR measurements. The furrow cross-sectional area increased by 11% and 34% under 20 mm and 40 mm irrigation compared to non-irrigated in the coarse sand experiment. In the loamy sand, the cross-sectional area increased by 17% and 15% by irrigation of 20 mm and 40 mm compared to non-irrigated measured using the LiDAR.