Development of Turning Control Method for a Paddy Weeding Robot

Abstract

As a herbicide-free weeding method, our research group are developing an autonomous running paddy weeding robot that can travel by a simple operation. The paddy weeding robot removes the weeds by churning up the soil and inhibits the growth of the weeds by blocking-off sunlight. In this paper, we propose a turning control method that performs a turning motion for repeating autonomous running. The proposed turning controller consists of three functions, final rice plant detection，turning control, and rows of rice plant detection. The experiment results demonstrate that the proposed turning control method is effective in turning motion for the paddy weeding robot.