The Keddie's Roboticity

"A FARMER's FRIEND" AN AUTONOMOUS MOBILE AGRICULTURAL ROBOT

ABSTRACT

In this project, we propose to build an unmanned autonomous mobile ground robot which can assist farmer by automatically spraying pesticides after the detection of plants which we call as, "A farmer's friend". We also address the problem of identifi cation of diseased plants at the base station. Agriculture is the backbone of India, most of the people depend on agriculture for their livelihood. In India the growth of scientifi c farming is very weak. Spraying pesticides is a very important job in farming activities, which is not easy due to the harmful eff ects it has on human beings. It is a cause of concern that the laborers are moving away from the agriculture due to increase in urbanization. Thus the farmers in India are reducing drastically.

Our robot is equipped with multiple sensors- ultrasonic sensors and wireless camera. It is attached with the high torque DC motors for navigation purpose on the grubby and marshy field. The actions of our robot are controlled by a low power consuming microcontroller MSP430F2274. We propose to give a demonstration of our fully working module in the farm fields. The robot autonomously navigates into the field and sprays pesticides on detecting plants, also it streams the video to the base station/TV for monitoring purpose. We have also provided a facility of making a video summary of the streamed video, to get an expert's opinion on the health of the plants.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

To design and construct an autonomous mobile agricultural robot, which can assist farmers in taking good care of their plants and keep a visual reference of the same. It is expected that our product would take measures to keep plants healthy, and allow farmers to monitor its actions and effects on the field.