AgroBot Smash a Robotic Platform for the Sustainable Precision Agriculture

Abstract

The growing need for production processes oriented to environmental sustainability is leading to the quickly spreading of robotic solutions. In this scenario, the Smart Machine for Agricultural Solutions High-tech SMASH project is focusing on the development of a robotic collaborative ecosystem. It consists of four main modules: an unmanned ground vehicle (AgroBot), a soil monitoring unit (Plantoid), an aerial unit (Fly-Bot), and a mobile service unit on the field (AncillaryBot). Furthermore, the SMASH project is implementing technological solutions with a view to resolve some issues related to nutrition safety (e.g. nitrate content on the vegetable) and environmental sustainability (e.g. pesticide use, production process waste) in two representative scenarios of specialty crops (viticulture) and vegetables (spinach). The present work reports the results concerning the design stage and development of the robotic terrestrial platform AgroBot and their implements for the crop protection management and physical control of weeds. A system made of a terrestrial wheeled platform with an innovative perception system and three types of implements have been built to make sustainable agronomic practices.

Task Space Model Predictive Control for Vineyard Spraying with a Mobile Manipulator

“…Research efforts have already been directed towards the development of robots for vineyard-related tasks [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. The same applies to robots in agricultural spraying tasks [2,[6][7][8][9]11,13,23].…”

“…For this reason, an additional criterion by which the joint commands are selected is introduced. The desired joint velocities qd that drive the robot arm to a desired pose q d are computed by another proportional controller, qd = K P,q (q d − q) (17) where K P,q is the controller gain. Finally, the joint velocity commands are selected by solving the following QP problem:…”

Unimodal and Multimodal Perception for Forest Management: Review and Dataset

“…Another application of perception systems in precision agriculture is characterising, monitoring, and phenotyping vegetative cultures using stereo vision [124,125], point clouds [126,127], satellite imagery [128], low-altitude aerial images [129], or multispectral imagery [130]. Along with these advances in terms of perception, several robotic platforms have appeared: for harvesting [101,102,[104][105][106], for precise spraying [131], for plant counting [132], and for general agricultural tasks [133][134][135][136]. A topic that is being increasingly studied in the agricultural sector is localisation and consequent autonomous navigation in crops.…”