Towards autonomy in agriculture: Design and prototyping of a robotic vehicle with seed selector

Abstract

Traditional method of seeding by farmers demands laborious work and is now becoming story of the past. Technological revolution in mechatronics and allied areas is reshaping the agricultural processes, making the robots an integral part of this automation. This paper presents design details of an autonomous robot developed keeping in view the constraints imposed by an agricultural field. The novelty of the proposed low-cost indigenously developed modular vehicle lies in design of its seed selector. The simple but efficient mechanism of the single seed selector with extremely low miss rate distinguishes the vehicle from other designs. Hardware details including sensing, actuation, processing and communication modules and software architecture are detailed in the paper. Results of trajectory tracking obtained by implementing the proposed scheme on a mini-robot and functionality of seed selector demonstrate potential of the presented robotic vehicle.