The boom in the electronics industry has made a variety of credit card-sized computer systems and plenty of accompanying sensing and acting elements widely available, at continuously diminishing cost and size levels. The benefits of this situation for agriculture are not left unexploited and thus, more accurate, efficient and environmentally-friendly systems are making the scene. In this context, there is an increasing interest in affordable, small-scale agricultural robots. A key factor for success is the balanced selection of innovative hardware and software components, among the plethora being available. This work describes exactly the steps for designing, implementing and testing a small autonomous electric vehicle, able to follow the farmer during the harvesting activities and to carry the fruits/vegetables from the plant area to the truck location. Quite inexpensive GPS and IMU units, assisted by hardware-accelerated machine vision, speech recognition and networking techniques can assure the fluent operation of a prototype vehicle exhibiting elementary automatic control functionality. The whole approach also highlights the challenges for achieving a truly working solution and provides directions for future exploitation and improvements.
Inevitably, the rapid growth of the electronics industry and the wide availability of tailored programming tools and support are accelerating the digital transformation of the agricultural sector. The latter transformation seems to foster the hopes for tackling the depletion and degradation of natural resources and increasing productivity in order to cover the needs of Earth’s continuously growing population. Consequently, people getting involved with modern agriculture, from farmers to students, should become familiar with and be able to use and improve the innovative systems making the scene. At this point, the contribution of the STEM educational practices in demystifying new areas, especially in primary and secondary education, is remarkable and thus welcome, but things become quite uncertain when trying to discover efficient practices for higher education, and students of agricultural engineering are not an exception. Indeed, university students are not all newcomers to STEM and ask for real-world experiences that better prepare them for their professional careers. Trying to bridge the gap, this work highlights good practices during the various implementation stages of electric robotic ground vehicles that can serve realistic agricultural tasks. Several innovative parts, such as credit card-sized systems, AI-capable modules, smartphones, GPS, solar panels, and network transceivers are properly combined with electromechanical components and recycled materials to deliver technically and educationally meaningful results.
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