Navigation and path planning are essential technologies for increasing the productivity of agriculture machine systems performing modern precision agriculture tasks. Production agriculture requires efficient methods for complete coverage of agricultural landscapes to complete the critical production steps of preparing the land and planting, managing, and harvesting crops. To help farmers to make the transformation from automated to autonomous systems requires approaches that can leverage the current automation advances from modern precision agricultural machinery and build on them as tools in the development and deployment of agricultural robots. This chapter provides a high-level overview of critical elements in autonomous navigation and path planning and discusses the opportunities and challenges related to building on precision agriculture technologies to enable productive agricultural robots.

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Guidance and navigation in agricultural machine systems: current practice
• 3 Mission planning for agricultural machines
• 4 Path planning for agricultural machines
• 5 Search and optimization methods
• 6 Navigation and motion control
• 7 Case studies
• 8 Conclusion and future trends
• 9 Where to look for further information
• 10 References

Dr. Reid is a Research Professor in Computer Science and Ag & Bio Engineering, and he is Executive Director in the Center for Digital Agriculture. Reid has more than 35 years of highly accomplished technology leadership experience in industry and academia. In 2017 he was recognized as John Deere Technical Fellow for his contributions in Technology Innovation. From 2020-2022, he was Vice President of Enterprise Technologies for Brunswick Corporation.