CHAP: Cotton-Harvesting Autonomous Platform

Abstract

The US cotton industry provided over 190,000 jobs and more than $28 billion total economic contributions to the United States in 2012. The US is the third-largest cotton-producing country in the world, following India and China. US cotton producers have been able to stay competitive with countries like India and China by adopting the latest technologies. Despite the success of technology adoption, there are still many challenges, e.g., increased pest resistance, mainly glyphosate resistant weeds, and early indications of bollworm resistance to Bt cotton (genetically modified cotton that contains genes for an insecticide). Commercial small unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) or mobile ground robots with navigation-sensing modality provide a platform to increase farm management efficiency. The platform can be retrofitted with different implements that perform a specific task, e.g., spraying, scouting (having multiple sensors), phenotyping, harvesting, etc. This paper presents a proof-of-concept cotton harvesting robot. The robot was retrofitted with a vacuum-type system with a small storage bin. A single harvesting nozzle was used and positioned based on where most cotton bolls were expected. The idea is to create a simplified system where cotton bolls′ localization was undertaken as a posteriori information, rather than a real-time cotton boll detection. Performance evaluation for the cotton harvesting was performed in terms of how effective the harvester suctions the cotton bolls and the effective distance of the suction to the cotton bolls. Preliminary results on field test showed an average of 57.4% success rate in harvesting locks about 12 mm from the harvester nozzle. The results showed that 40.7% was harvested on Row A while 74.1% in Row B for the two-row test. Although both results were promising, further improvements are needed in the design of the harvesting module to make it suitable for farm applications.

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<strong>Technological Advancements in Cotton Agronomy: A Review and Prospects</strong>

“…Over the years, towards more sustainable cotton cultivation, several practices and technological innovations and advancements have been proposed and adopted by the cotton industry to enhance yield, minimize farm input use, improve disease and stress resistance, reduce drudgery in cotton agronomy, and encourage consumer acceptability of cotton which has moved from a merely 4% of global market share of fibers used for textiles production in the 18 th century to about 48% in modern times [9] . Among these innovations and technological advances are the continuous development of new varieties (cultivars) of cotton by multinational seed companies and researchers and the widespread adoption by the growers, improved mulching and irrigation methods, precision agriculture technologies leading to reduced input (pesticide/chemical) use, application of unmanned aerial systems (UAS)/remote sensing systems, image processing techniques, machine learning algorithms for improved soil nutrient and weed management and crop health, autonomous harvesters with various onboard module building capabilities, and the recently proposed small robotic harvesting technology to enable multiple-pass harvesting of seed cotton [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] .…”

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