Simplified vision based automatic navigation for wheat harvesting in low income economies
This addresses the manual labor and stress faced by low-income farmers in South Asia due to extreme weather conditions, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing agricultural robotics with a simplified approach.
The authors tackled the problem of automating wheat harvesting for low-income farmers by developing a prototype automated power reaper that uses a simple vision-based navigation system with a low-cost camera and assisted GPS, achieving demonstrated efficiency in real field scenarios.
Recent developments in the domain of agricultural robotics have resulted in development of complex and efficient systems. Most of the land owners in the South Asian region are low income farmers. The agricultural experience for them is still a completely manual process. However, the extreme weather conditions, heat and flooding, often combine to put a lot of stress on these small land owners and the associated labor. In this paper, we propose a prototype for an automated power reaper for the wheat crop. This automated vehicle is navigated using a simple vision based approach employing the low-cost camera and assisted GPS. The mechanical platform is driven by three motors controlled through an interface between the proposed vision algorithm and the electrical drive. The proposed methodology is applied on some real field scenarios to demonstrate the efficiency of the vision based algorithm.