Development of intra-row weeding robot equipped with pull-out weeding mechanism and image recognition system

Abstract

For reducing the labor of weeding in field agriculture, we propose a small weeding robot. We developed a small robot vehicle which has two cameras and a manipulator. The cameras are attached to the robot in a downward direction to capture images of the fields. By applying deep learning to these images, crops and weeds are discriminated in real time. A conveyor belt-like gripper is attached to the end of the manipulator and can uproot weeds growing in intra-row spacing. To proof of our concept, indoor weeding experiments using artificial flowers were conducted. The results show that autonomous weeding by using image recognition was possible.