Design and Development of Three DoF Solar Powered Smart Spraying Agricultural Robot

Abstract

In recent years the agricultural industry is revolutionized by automation and robotics that has resulted in reduction of labor and production costs with increased agri produce to meet the market demand. Manual spraying of pesticides and herbicides to crops and weed inhibitors onto the field are harmful to both humans and the environment. This paper proposes a solar powered, flexible, semi-automated pesticide spraying robot with three Degrees of Freedom (DoF) in movement. The micro-spraying system is operated by an Android app via Bluetooth. The robot is designed to spray pesticide/insecticide directly onto individual lesions minimizing wastage leading to reduced consumption of chemicals hence making the system cost effective and environmental friendly. The targeted pesticide delivery prevents dispersion of chemicals in the environment. A prototype is developed and tested on different terrain conditions and is found to operate efficiently