Autonomous agricultural robot

Abstract

The automation of agricultural machinery in Australia has tended towards refining the operation of existing equipment including tilling, spraying and harvesting tasks. Little effort has been focused on developing an alternative to some of the labour intensive tasks, such as weed chipping, spot spraying and crop monitoring. It is proposed that an autonomous agricultural robot, utilising recent developments in machine vision and global position system (GPS) navigation, would provide a cost effective alternative to a hired hand for such repetitive tasks. This paper presents the design and currently status of a robotic platform for row crop tending currently under development at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Details presented include the configuration of the prototype platform, control and drive systems. an overview of the navigation model and the low cost of GPS receivers and vision systems.