Agriculture plays a pivotal role in our modern society having a profound influence on the socioeconomic aspects of our daily lives. Farming also significantly impacts environment, particularly through the use of pesticides, fertilizers and terraforming, as well as, erosion and depletion of soil.

As a solution to alleviate impact of agriculture, precise positioning has emerged as a primary approach enabling the minimization of the utilization of harmful and costly substances. Moreover, it serves as an effective means to reduce water consumption, energy expenditure, and labor expenses amongst other things. These improvements are achievable via increase in automation, enhanced management and decision making, as well as, more precise control and observation of resource use and crop health and yield, enabled by accurate position information.

 Precision agriculture has so far relied almost solely on precision GNSS-solutions. For best absolute accuracy,  RTK (Real Time Kinematic) methods are generally utilized. Implementing GNSS-RTK on each farming tool becomes costly and moreover, is very unlikely the most accurate solutions, especially when utilized alone.

This project develops optical and other sensing techniques and utilizes them in addition to precision GNSS, to establish the relative position between a tractor and a trailer and then further constructing absolute position of specific parts of the agricultural tool ensemble via detailed system and lever arm model and sensor fusion methods.