Design and Implementation of a Mobile Agricultural Robot for Remote Sensing Applications

Abstract

The number of electronic devices connected to agricultural machinery is increasing to support new agricultural tasks related to the Precision Agriculture such as remote sensing and spatial variability mapping. Based on the necessity of projecting more automated agricultural machines and implements, a current trend in the agricultural area is the development of mobile robots and autonomous vehicles. These robots and vehicles developed with the same technologies existing in agricultural machinery can be more efficient doing specific tasks than traditional large tractors, giving the same, or even greater, overall output as conventional systems. One of the major challenges in the design of these robots is the development of the electronic architecture for the integration and control of the several devices related to the motion, navigation, data acquisition and communication (or teleoperation) systems. A technology that has strong potential to be applied on the devices interconnection in agricultural machinery is the CAN protocol. This technology provides significant benefits and has been used as an embedded control network in agricultural robots and vehicles. The implementation of the ISO11783 (ISOBUS) standard represents the standardization of the CAN protocol for application in agricultural machinery. This work describes the design and implementation of a mobile agricultural robot for remote sensing applications. The discussions are focused on the developed electronic architecture, the wireless communication system for teleoperation and the distributed control based on CAN protocol and ISO11783 for the mobile agricultural robot. The evaluation of the developed system was based on the analysis of the performance parameters obtained with the robot operation. The results show that the developed systems meet the design requirements for an accurate robot movement and an acceptable response time for control commands and supervision. It is expected that this paper can also support the development of mobile agricultural robots and CAN and ISO11783 based distributed control technologies.