Design and Kinematic Analysis of Cable-Driven Target Spray Robot for Citrus Orchards

Abstract

In Southeast Asia, many varieties of citrus are grown in hilly areas. Compared with plain orchards, it is difficult for large spraying equipment to move in hilly orchards. Small spraying equipment can enter hilly orchards, but their spraying power cannot make droplets penetrate into the canopy, resulting in low deposition rates within the canopy. As a kind of unstructured narrow space, the branches within the canopy are interlaced, thus a flexible manipulator that can move within the canopy is required. In this paper, a novel remote-controlled, cable-driven target spray robot (CDTSR) was designed to achieve a precise spray within the canopy. It consisted of a small tracked vehicle, a cable-driven flexible manipulator (CDFM), and a spray system. The CDFM had six degrees of freedom driven by a cable tendon. The forward and inverse kinematics model of the CDFM were established and then the semispherical workspace was calculated. Furthermore, while considering precise control requirements, the dynamics equations were derived. The experimental results demonstrated that the CFDM could move dexterously within the canopy with interlacing branches to reach pests and diseases areas in the canopy. The entire operation took 3.5 s. This study solved the problem of a low spray deposition rate within a canopy and has potential applications in agricultural plant protection.

Actuators and Sensors for Application in Agricultural Robots: A Review

“…Due to the diverse types of agricultural production and complex processes, which lead to a large family of agricultural robots, agricultural robots have various end-effectors to accomplish their operational tasks [110]. To address the problems of the difficulty in using large sprayers in hilly orchards, mechanical damage to fruit trees, and a low deposition rate within the canopy of fruit trees, Bao et al [111] designed a new remotecontrolled cable-driven target spray robot based on a concentric tubular manipulator with six degrees of freedom and using a spring-hinged structure. For weeding problems in the field, mechanical weeding is the most promising weeding method for weed management in organic agriculture.…”

Simultaneous arm morphing quadcopter and autonomous flight system design

“…Electronic hardware and software technology is widely used in aircrafts. All information is instantly controlled from the ground control station thanks to the remote communication network (Bao et al , 2022). Today, they are preferred because they are used for different tasks without risking the human factor – search and rescue (Holzmann et al , 2021).…”