RobotGreen. A Teleoperated Agricultural Robot for Structured Environments

Abstract

This paper presents the development of a remote robotic platform to monitor and take care of urban crops. The agricultural robot performs activities such as sowing, irrigation, fumigation, and pruning activities on a small scalable structured crop. The generalities of the design of an anthropomorphic robot with five degrees of freedom, the description of the development of a multipurpose end effector for the development of agricultural tasks, the implemented architecture of the teleoperation system of the robot is presented, including a visual support system and the employment of a low-cost master robot that allows the slave robot to be controlled more intuitively. Finally, some experimental results that show the functioning of the system are presented.

Agricultural Robotics for Field Operations

“…In order to allow the robot to execute more than one task, three main approaches have been identified: designing a robot that can be equipped with different implements [134], designing a modular robot [135], or equipping the robot with all the tools from the beginning [136]. It is worth mentioning that all robots are autonomous, however, two of them allow the user to manually control them as well if needed [137,138], and two of them are fixed in place with teleoperation systems being used [139,140]. A list of the most significant reviewed multi-purpose robots and the tasks that they can perform is given in Table 9.…”

“…Different design approaches lead to robots that are equipped with a variety of perception and measurement sensors. There are robots equipped only with humidity and temperature sensors [136], robots that combine more sensors (humidity, temperature sensors and color cameras) [139] and robots that are just equipped with color cameras [134]. Finally, as mentioned before, some of the robots are modular, meaning the sensors that they carry change according to the modules used [141], while other robots can be fitted with additional sensors according to the growers' needs [134].…”

“…Arable crops Sonar sensor, temperature Monitoring, spraying, fertilization, disease detection [138] Arable crops Three cameras with IR filter, humidity & ultrasonic sensors Ploughing, seeding, harvesting, spraying [146] Arable crops, polytunnels, greenhouse 2D LiDAR, ultrasonic sensors, an RGB camera & a monochromatic IR camera Harrowing, soil sampling, phenotyping, additional tasks by combining modules [135] Arable crops Soil sensors Ploughing, irrigation, seeding [147] Greenhouse Two color cameras, machine vision sensor Spraying, weeding, additional tasks by adding or removing components [134] Arable crops Humidity and temperature air sensor, IR sensors Ploughing, seeding, irrigation, spraying, monitoring [136] Urban crops Color camera, temperature, humidity and luminosity sensors Sowing, irrigation, fumigation, pruning [139] Arable crops Voltage sensors Seeding, spraying, ploughing, mowing [148] Arable crops 2D LiDAR, ultrasonic sensor, IR camera Seeding, weeding, ploughing [141] Arable crops N/A Sowing, sprinkling, weeding, harvesting [149] Arable crops CloverCam, RoboWeedCamRT Seeding, weeding [137] Vineyards N/A Pruning, weeding, mowing [150] Arable crops N/A Precision seeding, ridging discs & mechanical row crop cleaning [151] To conclude, multipurpose robots perform more than one field operation of the production cycle, and at this point in time, no solutions have achieved the level of modularity and good performance needed, as being able to perform multiple tasks adds complexity to hardware and software. On the bright side, the same solutions that can be used for the individual task robots can also be applied to the multipurpose ones.…”