2008 Volume 43 Issue 3 Pages 135-141
We propose a photovoltaic powered farming robot system that consists of a delivery vehicle and a working vehicle. The proposed system is designed based on a newly proposed farming method called shaft tillage cultivation. As such, we have developed two automatic vehicles, as well as a 2-D localization method for the positioning of the working vehicle. In addition, we have developed an attachment for shaft tillage and transplanting, which is derived from commercially available transplanting machines. In this paper, we introduce the mechanism and control method of the developed attachment. In addition, we experimentally examined the transplanting performance and measured power consumption. In the transplanting experiment, we found that approximately 96% of seedlings were automatically transplanted when using developed attachment. Total power consumption for one cycle was found to be approximately 1kJ, two-thirds of which was consumed during shaft tillage. Although the fundamental performance of the developed attachment can be predicted based on these experimental results, several problems need to be solved before a fully automatic system can be constructed. Specifically, sensing functions for judging whether seedlings have been extracted from the cell tray as well as the budding condition of seedlings in the cell tray, and a method for examining the power consumption associated with shaft tillage cultivation of a test field covered with live weeds need to be implemented.
