Design and Testing of an Autonomous Ground Robot for Agricultural Applications

This senior project discusses the design and testing of an autonomous ground robot for agricultural applications such as strawberries. The vehicle will feature a robotic arm that will be programmed to perform various tasks, such as collecting soil and leaf samples of the crop or measuring soil moisture and salinity. Various components were chosen to be implemented on the vehicle due its power requirements and operating environment. Finite Element Analysis testing was done on the frame of the vehicle to ensure the adequacy of the design

Development of an Automatous Ground Robot for Strawberry Yield Monitoring

The objective of this project was to design and build an autonomous agricultural robot platform that is ready to be adapted for strawberry yield predication. The robot was required to have an all-electric drivetrain as a requirement for the project. A key requirement for this robot is to have the flexibility to be used with different crops and with different applications. It is also designed to be able to change width for use in fields with varying row spacing. The end product of these design requirements is a robot platform that has the capability of supporting a payload in excess of 200 pounds, allowing for installation of equipment for many different applications. The robot has four-wheel drive and four wheel steering capability, all with electric motors and actuators

Design of an Autonomous Agriculture Robot for Real Time Weed Detection using CNN

Agriculture has always remained an integral part of the world. As the human population keeps on rising, the demand for food also increases, and so is the dependency on the agriculture industry. But in today's scenario, because of low yield, less rainfall, etc., a dearth of manpower is created in this agricultural sector, and people are moving to live in the cities, and villages are becoming more and more urbanized. On the other hand, the field of robotics has seen tremendous development in the past few years. The concepts like Deep Learning (DL), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML) are being incorporated with robotics to create autonomous systems for various sectors like automotive, agriculture, assembly line management, etc. Deploying such autonomous systems in the agricultural sector help in many aspects like reducing manpower, better yield, and nutritional quality of crops. So, in this paper, the system design of an autonomous agricultural robot which primarily focuses on weed detection is described. A modified deep-learning model for the purpose of weed detection is also proposed. The primary objective of this robot is the detection of weed on a real-time basis without any human involvement, but it can also be extended to design robots in various other applications involved in farming like weed removal, plowing, harvesting, etc., in turn making the farming industry more efficient. Source code and other details can be found at https://github.com/Dhruv2012/Autonomous-Farm-RobotComment: Published at the AVES 2021 conference. Source code and other details can be found at https://github.com/Dhruv2012/Autonomous-Farm-Robo

Towards autonomy in agriculture: Design and prototyping of a robotic vehicle with seed selector

Traditional method of seeding by farmers demands laborious work and is now becoming story of the past. Technological revolution in mechatronics and allied areas is reshaping the agricultural processes, making the robots an integral part of this automation. This paper presents design details of an autonomous robot developed keeping in view the constraints imposed by an agricultural field. The novelty of the proposed low-cost indigenously developed modular vehicle lies in design of its seed selector. The simple but efficient mechanism of the single seed selector with extremely low miss rate distinguishes the vehicle from other designs. Hardware details including sensing, actuation, processing and communication modules and software architecture are detailed in the paper. Results of trajectory tracking obtained by implementing the proposed scheme on a mini-robot and functionality of seed selector demonstrate potential of the presented robotic vehicle

Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems

In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance

GPS-guided mobile robot platform featuring modular design elements for agricultural applications : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Engineering in Mechatronics at Massey University Turitea Campus, Palmerston North, New Zealand

The agricultural industry has not seen significant innovation in development of low-cost automated farming solutions, with current systems costing several thousands of dollars to implement. Currently these automated solutions are primarily implemented around crop planting and harvesting, and the large implementation cost of these systems makes them unfeasible for small-scale operations. Within many agricultural industries, workers expend a considerable amount of time undertaking simple tasks that are labour intensive. Many of these tasks could instead be completed using a self-driving robotic platform outfitted with the appropriate devices required for the tasks. This thesis covers the research work aiming to produce a solution that could turn an existing farming vehicle into a multipurpose low-cost agricultural platform, to act as the platform for an autonomous vehicle capable of performing pre-programmed tasks within an agricultural environment. A quad bike was selected as the vehicle platform for this research in which the control modules would control the speed and direction of this farm bike. Four modules were developed to control the vehicle components that would normally be operated by a human operator. These modules are comprised of mechanical actuators coupled with a microcontroller control system and includes some specific designs to maintain the user's ability to manually control the pre-existing systems. A gear-changing module controls the vehicles manual gearbox, providing a method to detect and control the vehicles current gear. A speed control module was developed to control the vehicles throttle and braking system and detects the vehicles speed. A steering module controls the vehicles steering system, allowing for accurate control of the vehicles direction. Finally, a vehicle controller module provides a central command interface that ties the previous three modules together and controls the vehicles electrical components and engine. Development of a low-cost differential GPS (DGPS) system was also undertaken to reduce the implementation cost of the system. Due to inconclusive results in relation to the positional accuracy of this system is was decided that a standard GPS system would be used for the vehicle prototype with further development on the DGPS system would be undertaken in future development of the research. The successful development of a farm automated vehicle platform was achieved through this research. With further improvement on software, intelligent control and the development of a low-cost differential global positioning satellite (GPS) system, a fully autonomous farm platform that can be outfitted with different tools or devices for the required farm tasks is feasible and practical

Design, modelling and control of a novel agricultural robot with interlock drive system

A current problem in the design of small and lightweight autonomous agricultural robots is how to create sufficient traction on soil to pull an agricultural implement or load. One promising solution is offered by the interlock drive system, which penetrates spikes into the soil to create traction. The combination of soil penetrating spikes and a push-pull design offers new possibilities for vehicle control. By controlling the interlocking of the spikes and pushing and pulling them against the main frame, the vehicle can perform tight maneuvers. To validate this idea, we designed a robot, capable of creating high traction and performing headland turns. The navigation of the new robot system is performed by actively pushing the spikes, mounted on a slide into the soil, while the main frame is pushed back and pulled forward. The vehicle of 2-meter length was able to turn on the spot, and could follow a straight line, just using the spikes and the push-pull mechanism. The trajectory and the performed measurements suggest, that a vehicle which uses only spikes for traction and steering is fully capable of performing autonomous tasks in agriculture fields