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

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.