Autonomous Agriculture Robot for Smart Farming
This addresses the problem of labor-intensive and inefficient farm operations for farmers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing robotics and perception technologies.
The project developed an autonomous agriculture robot (AAR) for smart farming, which demonstrated promising results in real-world environments by performing tasks like weed cutting and fluid delivery for low-height vegetable crops.
This project aims to develop and demonstrate a ground robot with intelligence capable of conducting semi-autonomous farm operations for different low-heights vegetable crops referred as Agriculture Application Robot(AAR). AAR is a lightweight, solar-electric powered robot that uses intelligent perception for conducting detection and classification of plants and their characteristics. The system also has a robotic arm for the autonomous weed cutting process. The robot can deliver fertilizer spraying, insecticide, herbicide, and other fluids to the targets such as crops, weeds, and other pests. Besides, it provides information for future research into higher-level tasks such as yield estimation, crop, and soil health monitoring. We present the design of robot and the associated experiments which show the promising results in real world environments.