AgriRobot: Autonomous Agricultural Robot System For Precision Spraying
Within agriculture there exists many global challenges including a shortage of farm workers in China, UK and other countries and regions; a lack of efficiency in orchards and farms; safety risks to operators; environment pollution; and pesticides residue in fruits. To address these challenges the AgriRobot project aims to extend and apply cutting-edge technology developments from driverless vehicles, robotics, and AI to develop a highly innovative agricultural robot system. The developed agricultural robot system will be a semi-autonomous agricultural robot comprising of two major coordinating systems, these being automatically Orchard navigation and intelligently spraying of Orchard crops.
Navigation System: The developed agricultural robot system has the capability to automatically travel along a row with an orchard or farm without collisions and can also intelligently manoeuvre to change from one row to another.. To achieve this the system applies a computer vision and AI based approach to detect trees and other obstacles such as humans from on-board RGB-Depth cameras.
Spraying System: The developed sensor-based variable-rate air-assisted sprayer can analyse the presence, size, shape, and density of target trees/plants, providing a unique and precision spraying operation applying only the necessary amount of pesticide when needed, leading to more efficient spraying while reducing the demand of human operators.
This project is supported by Innovate UK
(Project No. 104016)