Abstract
In recent years, concern for the safety of food is growing, and interest in organic farming is increasing. In Asia, as one of environment-friendly organic farming, rice-duck farming was been practiced for more than twenty years. It is the integrated farming of rice and duck. The farmed ducks are put in the paddy field and eat weeds and pest insects. However, the effect of their weeding and pest control depends on their field of activities. To improve the efficiency of the weeding and the pest control, a radio-controlled duck robot for guiding farmed ducks around the whole paddy field was developed in the previous works. This duck robot can guide farmed ducks with clucking, wing flapping, and feeding. The aim of this study is to improve the robotic guide duck to be able to autonomously locomote between rice sequences. A camera and a microprocessor installed in the autonomous duck robot is sending the image data to the external personal computer by Bluetooth, and the external personal computer processes the image and the control information is calculated. Then the external personal computer is sending the control information to the microprocessor installed in the autonomous duck robot by Bluetooth, and the microprocessor controls the crawler for locomotion on the soft ground. From experimental results in the paddy field, the obstacle avoidance performance was verified.
