Recent Advances in Agricultural Robots

Tomonari Furukawa
Mechatronics group
School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering
University of New South Wales
October 29, 2002

1. Introduction
The development of a robotic system is aimed at enabling tasks that cannot be done
by human workers or replacing human tasks that are considered to be inefficient or
subject to danger. Today there are over one million robots in the world, and many of
them are successfully operated in factory environments. This population continues to
grow, and, due to the existence of a number of laborious human tasks, robotisation in
outdoor environments has received considerable attention in the last decade. This
includes mining, agricultural, underwater and space industries.
There have, however, not been successful implementations of robots in outdoor
environments. This is also true for agricultural industry. The difficulty for handling an
outdoor environment in comparison to an indoor environment is largely due to the facts
that
 The outdoor environment is larger in area,
 The structure of the outdoor environment is much more complicated and
unknown,
which characterizes outdoor robotics as
(1) There are a number of different tasks to be conducted,
(2) Each task requires high-level intelligence in sensing, planning and actuating.
The first objective of this article is to review ongoing research activities of groups who
are developing agricultural robots.
Many sub-problems necessary for the automation have not been even solved yet.
The second objective of this article is thus to classify problems existing in agricultural
robotics as sub-problems, briefly review updated research projects to solve each sub-
problem and introduce problem setups for agricultural robotics.

2. Agricultural Robots
2.1. Introduction
Agricultural tasks require to “move and manipulate”. The conceptual design of an
agricultural robot thus results in a vehicle with a manipulator mounted. As the outdoor
environment is difficult to configure, the autonomous vehicle and manipulator each
require possessing sensors. The minimum requirement is a vision sensor, which gives
the highest level of recognition of environment among all sensors. In addition, the
vehicle must know where he is as accurately as possible. This requires the vehicle to
possess a GPS, which provides the vehicle location in global coordinates, and a range
finder, which provides the vehicle location relative to its neighboring landmarks.
Several research groups in the world are presently developing a general-purpose
agricultural robot and succeeded in automating a specific task that requires intelligence,
although they are still far away from a fully autonomous agricultural robot. These
groups include (1) CIRAA group (Italy), (2) Institute of Agricultural Engineering group
(Italy?), (3) Kyoto University group (Japan) and (4) Hokkaido University Group (Japan)
/ University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Group (USA). The next subsections
introduce the objective, system configuration and results of each group.

2.2. CIRAA group (Italy)

Objective
This project is aimed at developing a robotic system for agricultural operations in
greenhouses. The group especially looks at tomato spraying tasks.
System
Figure 1 shows the system developed, which consists of a vehicle carrying a 6 DOF
arm, a gripper/hand, a 2 DOF head (Figure 2) and a system controller. Attached to the
head is a stereovision that is used to both navigate the vehicle to follow the path
specified when moving and explore the plant when stopping. The detection of ripe
tomatoes is conducted by a color image processing strategy.

Figure 1 Agricultural robot Figure 2 Vision system

 http://www.lira.dist.unige.it/Projects/Research/Stuff/pomo.html

2.3. Institute of Agricultural Engineering group (Italy?)

Figure 3 Agricultural robot Figure 4 Gripper

Objective
The objective of this project is to develop a multi-purpose agricultural robot. The
group particularly looked at the automation of fruit detection and harvesting.
System configuration
The system consists of a vehicle shown in Figure 3, which possesses sensors and
actuators.
For sensing, a multispectral sensor which enables image acquisition at multiple
wavelengths was evaluated for fruit detection. The system selected comprises of an
acoustic-optic tunable filter (AOTF) with an appropriate optical adapter for mounting it
on a camera. The filter's spectral range was defined from 500 to 1000nm, which covers
most of the visible and part of the NIR spectrum. In addition, appropriate electronics
were ordered which enabled switching between tuned wavelengths in 0.25ms. This
system was connected to a sensitive B/W camera.
A gripper shown in Figure 4 was designed for transplanting. The gripper seedlings
grasping is composed of a pneumatic piston which actuates two parallel hinged jaws
that perform a scissors type movement, which cause the jaws to grasp the plant in
between. Gripping force can be changed by changing the outlet pressure of the
compressor (the pneumatic components are situated on the base frame of the robot,
including compressor).
Results
The exact grasping force was empirically found to be 1.5 - 2 Kg, this force was
found to be efficient for appropriate gripping. Lower values of gripping force caused
failure to pull seedlings out from the tray.
The robotic melon harvester was adapted to the transplanting task (Figure 5).
Experiments with the prototype system equipped with an L shape pneumatic gripper
were performed for lettuce, tomato plants for industry use and celery plants and yielded
an average of 92% successful transplanting cycles.

Figure 5 Planting task

http://www.agri.gov.il/AGEN/Reports/AgriculturalRobot.html

2.4. Kyoto University (Japan)

Objective
The objective of this group research is to develop an agricultural robot to harvest
watermelons. The group have not mounted a sensor to detect the location of a
watermelon but focused on the developments of a manipulator and an end-effector with
passive force control that can handle a bulky fruit efficiently.
System configuration
Three robots sequentially developed are shown in Figures 6-8. Providing the
location of each watermelon, which is normally planted in a structured manner, the
manipulator reaches a position above the watermelon of concern by sliding some links
in a manipulator. The end-effector, then, grabs it and the manipulator places it on the
other side of the road (Figure 8).
 Figure 6 Robot 1 Figure 7 Robot 2

Figure 8 Robot 3

http://elam.kais.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~sakai/

2.5. Hokkaido University group (Japan) / University of Illinois at Urbana

Champaign group (USA)
Objective
The objective of the group research is to develop a general-purpose agricultural
vehicle that can be driven autonomously. The groups focus on the automatic planting of
a crop.
Vehicle 1
Shown in Figure 9 is the first agricultural vehicle that was developed by this group.
The location of the vehicle is detected by two sensors located in a field as shown in
Figure 10. The central computer collects the sensor data and controls the vehicle
remotely.
 Figure 9 Vehicle 1 Figure 10 System configuration

Vehicle 2
The new vehicle system shown in Figure 11 possesses an RTK-DGPS and a fiber
optical gyroscope to identify its location. The process for vehicle operation is as
follows. Firstly, a navigation map, which records a path traveled, is constructed. The
vehicle then follows the path by correcting its position through sensor feedback
automatically.

Figure 11 Vehicle 2

http://avse.bpe.agr.hokudai.ac.jp/research/robot/
http://www.age.uiuc.edu/oree/autonomous_guidance.htm

3. Sensing
3.1. Vision
3.1.1. Introduction
Vision is an essential sensing technology for autonomous robots moving in an
unknown environment.
 Vision is a useful robotic sensor since it mimics the human sense of vision and
allows for non-contact measurement of the environment.
“Visual sensing and moving” is a core technology when
. An alternative to increasing the accuracy of these subsystems is to use a visual-
feedback control loop, which will increase the overall accuracy of the system. Taken to
the extreme, machine vision can provide closed-loop position control for a robot. This
is referred to as visual servoying.

3.1.2.

4. Mobile Robotics
4.1. Localization and map-building
Localization is a necessary technique for an autonomous robot that has inaccurate
robot and/or sensor models. Map-building is additionally indispensable when a vehicle
is located in an unknown or poorly known environment (Simultaneous Localization and
map-building). Fundamental theories based on Kalman filter have been already
established, and some practical applications, including ground, air and underwater
vehicles, can be seen. However, many inappropriate assumptions, such as the
consideration of a landmark as a point, limit the applicability of these techniques to real-
world problems.
The map of the agricultural field, crops in which are regularly planted, is relatively
known not but fully known. It is one of the areas necessary for research on the
autonomous vehicles for agriculture.

4.2. Planning and control

Planning of an optimal vehicle motion from an initial configuration to a terminal
configuration under the existence of obstacles has been researched widely by the
computer science and robotics communities. The recent research includes online
motion planning, which finds an optimal path where the motion is planned based on the
information from sensors iteratively. The computer science particularly focused on the
shortest path problem, and a number of algorithms can be found in this field.
More important for outdoor vehicles are time-optimal problems where kinematic
and dynamic constraints of the vehicle are considered. The fundamental theory for
time-optimal control has been established by the author [Furukawa, 2002].
5. Manipulator Robotics
Having been the core of robotics research, manipulator robotics has been studied
from various aspects. The majority of manipulators are however implemented in
factory environments, and the implementation of manipulators has been poorly
published.
The motion planning and control of a manipulator for fruit picking, as an example
for agricultural robotics, is formulated as
 To move it from one configuration to another efficiently as far as obstacles such
as branches of a tree cannot be observed in a close environment.
 To move it with feedback from a vision or other sensor carefully when branches
or fruits for picking are expected in a close environment.
Branches form a specific non-linear geometry, so that there exists a necessity for
formulation for the outdoor manipulator in motion planning and control.

6. Mobile manipulator
The research of the mobile manipulator, which becomes the base system of an
agricultural robot, has just begun. As the most effective usage of mobile manipulators is
handling a bulky object, controlling multiple mobile manipulators has been intensively
studied in this field [Desai, et al, 1998][Herbert, 2000].

References
H. Feder, J. Leonard, and C. Smith, "Adaptive mobile robot navigation and
mapping, " Int. J. Robotics Research, vol. 18, pp. 650--668, 1999 2001.
Desai J, Ostrowski J, Kumar V (1998) Controlling formations of multiple mobile
robots, Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2864-2869
Herbert G. Tanner and Kostas J. Kyriakopoulos, "Nonholonomic Motion Planning
for Mobile Manipulators", citeseer.nj.nec.com/tanner00nonholonomic.html, 2000.
Tomonari Furukawa, "Time-subminimal Trajectory Planning for Discrete Nonlinear
Systems," Engineering Optimization, Vol. 34, pp. 219-243, 2002.