Design and Implementation of an Urban Farming Robot

Abstract

Urban agriculture can be shortly defined as the growing of plants and/or the livestock husbandry in and around cities. Although it has been a common occupation for the urban population all along, recently there is a growing interest in it both from public bodies and researchers, as well as from ordinary citizens who want to engage in self-cultivation. The modern citizen, though, will hardly find the free time to grow his own vegetables as it is a process that requires, in addition to knowledge and disposition, consistency. Given the above considerations, the purpose of this work was to develop an economic robotic system for the automatic monitoring and management of an urban garden. The robotic system was designed and built entirely from scratch. It had to have suitable dimensions so that it could be placed in a balcony or a terrace, and be able to scout vegetables from planting to harvest and primarily conduct precision irrigation based on the growth stage of each plant. Fertigation and weed control will also follow. For its development, a number of technologies were combined, such as Cartesian robots’ motion, machine vision, deep learning for the identification and detection of plants, irrigation dosage and scheduling based on plants’ growth stage, and cloud storage. The complete process of software and hardware development to a robust robotic platform is described in detail in the respective sections. The experimental procedure was performed for lettuce plants, with the robotic system providing precise movement of its actuator and applying precision irrigation based on the specific needs of the plants.

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“…Mechanization is important to improve efficiency and reduce dependence on manual labor. A system for automated fruit picking using robots fitted with robotic arms was proposed by the authors of [ 83 ]. Before putting end-effectors into the fruit’s bottom half, the fruit-harvesting robot uses sensors and computer vision to identify and estimate the fruit’s location.…”

Rancang bangun bobot kartesian tiga axis untuk penyiraman tanaman yang akurat dan efisien

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Design and Implementation of a Low-Cost, Linear Robotic Camera System, Targeting Greenhouse Plant Growth Monitoring

“…For example, a constructed machine vision-guided lettuce sensing and features' monitoring system (color, morphological, textual, and spectral) is illustrated in [33]. In [34], an urban robotic farming platform is demonstrated on a laboratory scale for lettuce recognition and subsequent water irrigation tasks. An integrated IoT-based, threedevice-system of autonomous moving platforms, aiming to facilitate precision farming and smart irrigation by utilizing the data collected from many sensors, was introduced in [35].…”