Development Of Orchard Robot With Autonomous Movement And Operation

Traditional agricultural machinery encountered some application problems in fruit production due to the complexity and precision of fruit agriculture. So fruit production is still labor intensive, which has led to challenges in management and standardization of fruit quality. We think the answer to this problem will be an intelligent orchard robot that can replace human labor in fruit plantation.Here we try to develop an orchard robot that can realize autonomously movement in formal mechanized orchard. Two principles will be adhered throughout the development. The first is to ensure the economical efficiency of the technology. And the second is enough flexibility and fitness to different orchard environment. Main works are as follows.(1)Based on the two principles above, system scheme of the orchard robot was designed. Design requirements and the design ideas of module and opening were analyzed. The overall solution design which includes mechanical body, control subsystem and software framework was presented.(2)Three kinds of environment mapping models was introduced and specific requirements for the mapping models were analyzed. Then we came up with a novel mapping method, which utilizes a quad aircraft to take photos of orchard overhead and combines image processing algorithm(IPA) and human-computer interaction(HCI) to extract information from the photos.(3)The comparison of travelling mechanisms between wheel type and crawler type was made. Kinematic model of crawler-type travelling mechanism were introduced and slip phenomenon was analyzed.(4)Targeted at autonomous cruise in orchard environment with row feature, an EKF based method of orchard navigation and location was introduced and a simple and effective mobile robot control algorithm was imported. And we focused on row detection and row-end detection using point cloud data acquired by two-dimension scanning laser radar.