Design and development of a semi‐autonomous agricultural vineyard sprayer: Human–robot interaction aspects

Abstract

This article presents the design aspects and development processes to transform a general‐purpose mobile robotic platform into a semi‐autonomous agricultural robot sprayer focusing on user interfaces for teleoperation. The hardware and the software modules that must be installed onto the system are described, with particular emphasis on human–robot interaction. Details of the technology are given focusing on the user interface aspects. Two laboratory experiments and two studies in the field to evaluate the usability of the user interface provide evidence for the increased usability of a prototype robotic system. Specifically, the study aimed to empirically evaluate the type of target selection input device mouse and digital pen outperformed Wiimote in terms of usability. A field experiment evaluated the effect of three design factors: (a) type of screen output, (b) number of views, (c) type of robot control input device. Results showed that participants were significantly more effective but less efficient when they had multiple views, than when they had a single view. PC keyboard was also found to significantly outperform PS3 gamepad in terms of interaction efficiency and perceived usability. Heuristic evaluations of different user interfaces were also performed using research‐based HRI heuristics. Finally, a study on participants’ overall user experience found that the system was evaluated positively on the User Experience Questionnaire scales.

Agribot-Model: Compact Solar Powered Sprayer Development

“…There are no health hazards to the operator. These results are fulfilling the criteria required for such model which were specified in the aim of this study and by other researchers' in the resents years (Chavan et al, 2015;Nithin et al, 2016;Sharma and Borse, 2016;Adamides et al, 2017a;Adamides et al, 2017b;Londhe and Sujata, 2017;Poudel et al, 2017).…”

Advances in Agriculture Robotics: A State-of-the-Art Review and Challenges Ahead

“…For a rural worker to apply the pesticide on the plants, he must wear several personal protective equipment. To relocate the rural worker who performs the application of pesticides to a safe environment, through human-machine interaction, researchers Adamides et al developed two robots, AgriRobot and SAVSAR (Figure 6m,n), to remotely spray pesticides on vineyards using a Human Machine Interface (HMI) [50]. Another mobile robot (shown in Figure 6o) was used to reduce the amount of material sprayed and, in this case, the robot has a RGB camera and distance sensors to automatically open the pesticide spray valve based on the machine vision Foliage Detection Algorithm (FDA) and Grape clusters Detection Algorithms (GDA), resulting in a 45% reduction in pesticide material [51].…”

Development of a sweet pepper harvesting robot

“…An apple harvester (Silwal et al, 2017) tested in a commercial orchard in Washington State evaluated performance for 150 fruits with no details on how many trees this included and/or timing of the tests. Other agricultural robots tested in field conditions include a pruning robot (Botterill et al, 2017) that was tested on a single row of one cultivar in 1 month and spraying robots (Adamides et al, 2017;Berenstein & Edan, 2018) that were tested in actual vineyard conditions focusing on human-robot interaction evaluation.…”