Mobile Robot for the Spraying of Corn Crops with autonomous navigation camera for the Plains of the Andes

Abstract

The incidence of the disease in horticultural crops is one of the important problems that affect the production of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Regular monitoring of crops for early diagnosis and treatment with pesticides or removal of the affected crop is part of the solution to minimize crop loss. The monitoring of crops by human labor is expensive, time consuming, prone to errors due to insufficient knowledge of the disease and highly repetitive at different stages of crop growth. These needs have motivated to design the mobile robot with vision sensors for navigation through the field. The robot has been designed in the Autodesk Inventor software. Programming for navigation is done in the Arduino Mega 2560 tool. Image capture has been performed using the RGB camera. Image processing for the identification of the disease and its representation in a graphical user interface has been performed using an algorithm in MATLAB R2018B that interacts with the Arduino tool through a communication bus. The system developed consists of the design of a prototype that uses simple and cost effective equipment such as Raspberry Pi, RGB camera, two motors and sensors that allow the autonomous fumigation of corn crops.