Development of Agriculture Robot for Plant Detection and Fertilizer Dispense

With the growing world population, limited agriculture resources and reduced number of people working in agriculture sector, the need for intelligent autonomous robots is increasing. Agriculture robots must perform a wide range of operations like spraying pesticides, dispense fertilizers, remove weeds. In this paper, we explain in detail an agriculture robot developed in Assistive Robotics Laboratory, Hosei University. It consists of three subsystems: 1) The wheel-type actuated system; 2) A parallel link arm and 3) Fertilizer system. The robot utilizes the visual information and the Convolution Neural Networks to recognize the target plants. To evaluate the performance of developed robot, we performed experiments for spinach recognition, fertilizer dispenser and robot spraying.