Introduction
Agricultural structured environments, like greenhouses, are facilities
where it's possible to obtain profitable crops, in virtue of favourable
agronomical conditions that can be realized in order to increase plants
growth. Unfortunately the favourable atmosphere created inside greenhouses
for plant growth causes pests and undesirable organisms to prosper as
well, making necessary the use of pesticides and other products that must
be sprayed directly on the plants quite necessary. Therefore, the
automation of cultural operations, some toxic for man like chemical
products treatments other tedious and repetitive like transplantation,
precise fertilization and artificial pollination has a quite favourable
social impact in terms of heath and safety.
Research activity
Research activity developed during last years has been addressed to study
the introduction in agricultural environment of automation systems and
robots able to cut down production costs; we have mainly worked for
structured environment facilities where is more high the reception of new
techniques based on automation.
The last prototype, designed and built at IMAMOTER Labs of Turin, Italy;
consists in a three degree of freedom manipulator that can be equipped
with a set of different for the different operations on the crop. End-effectors can add further degrees of freedom to the system.
Robot is equipped with a visual CCD-camera sensor system that is used for
motion control and targets recognition (pots). Visual information,
provided by the CCD-camera are worked out by a personal computer and
transformed in end-effectors trajectories.
Robot operates at fix point and it has been designed to be coupled with a
belt- conveyor displacement system for pallets containing pots. Robot was
assembled in a recent greenhouse of Liguria region. In that occasion the
robot was programmed to execute two operations like precise fertilization,
on a type of pots, and pesticide spraying under leaves, on a different
crop.
Cooperation
Different competences converged towards the projects: Mechanics from
IMAMOTER, electronic from Politecnico of Turin and automation from Faculty
of Agraria of Turin.
Coming developments
We are addressed to study a new robot prototype able to perform several
operations in order to satisfy request coming from operators to reduce the
costs of plant production.
At the same time we are studying new procedures for pattern recognition of
targets that have to be manipulated (fruits, flowers, leaves canopy etc.)
Funding
Project has been carried out in part through institutional fund, in part
through private funding.
Focus