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The Agriculture Robot

The document summarizes an agricultural robot designed to sample soil moisture content across a large farm. The robot stores sampling location and soil moisture data in a file to upload to a computerized drip irrigation system controller. This allows optimizing water use and avoiding over-watering. The robot uses a belt drive system with two parallel chains connected to two motors to move compactly. Potential improvements include making the chains equally taut and adding grips to prevent slipping. The robot is coded on the RobotC platform and can be manually controlled via Bluetooth on a mobile phone. An arm aims to horizontally place the soil moisture sensor to get accurate readings.

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Siddhartha Das
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75 views

The Agriculture Robot

The document summarizes an agricultural robot designed to sample soil moisture content across a large farm. The robot stores sampling location and soil moisture data in a file to upload to a computerized drip irrigation system controller. This allows optimizing water use and avoiding over-watering. The robot uses a belt drive system with two parallel chains connected to two motors to move compactly. Potential improvements include making the chains equally taut and adding grips to prevent slipping. The robot is coded on the RobotC platform and can be manually controlled via Bluetooth on a mobile phone. An arm aims to horizontally place the soil moisture sensor to get accurate readings.

Uploaded by

Siddhartha Das
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Agriculture Robot Introduction: We started with the idea of creating an agricultural robot, basically a mini-ATV that samples

the soilmoisture content at various locations of a huge farm, controlled by a computerized drip-irrigation system. The bot stores the data in a file (the sampling locations along with the corresponding soilmoisture data), which is to later uploaded on the controller system and could be processed to plan out the optimum use of the water available and avoid water-logging (which is actually not possible in this case as we are assuming a drip-irrigation system, hence a dry scenario). Driving mechanism: After trying out many different drives on paper or on practice, we finally settled for a belt-drive (tank drive). The other designs that we eventually rejected were Shrimp, Four-wheel drive with four-large wheel, Four-belts in place for four large wheels etc. Features of the final driving mechanism: 1. Two motor powered, motors placed parallel, not together, as the main focus of the design was to make the robot as compact as possible. 2. Two parallel chains mounted on two sprockets, coupled to a gear, which is then connected to the motor to increase the torque at the point of application. A total of 8 large and 8 small sprockets have been used. A larger pair has been powered on each flank. 3. The two motors while both moving forward, actually rotates the robot, so to move the robot straight, the motors should be rotated in the opposite sense. A few problems / possible improvements: 1. The chains are not equally taut on both the sides resulting in a slight drift in one direction, while moving in one direction. 2. A belt should be placed over the chains, so as to increase grip, otherwise the robot slips in softer mud and smooth surfaces. 3. Instead of leaving space between two sprockets Coding and Bluetooth interfacing: The coding has been done on RobotC platform. The mobile phone interfacing with the NXT using Bluetooth to control the robot manually was done using NXT Symbian. (http://nxtsymbian.sourceforge.net/). Arm Design: The basic purpose of the arm is to place the soil-moisture sensor in a horizontal level in order to get a valid concurrent reading. It has not been tested intensively and a lot of improvements are possible. Possible enhancements: Once, the sampling done by the robot the following manipulations and data mining can be done: 1. Creating a continuous map-based output using discrete sampling and concepts of signal processing. 2. Creating an instruction file for the controller. 3. Recognizing faulty sprinklers in the irrigation system, by keeping record of data over a period of time.

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