In Japan, the decreasing population of farmers and the increasing ages of those who remain have become serious problems. To deal with these problems, community-based farming and corporate farming are increasing in popularity, with the goal of cultivating a larger field area by using a progressively smaller number of people. To accomplish this, farmers need support from advanced technology to permit automatic guidance and unmanned operation of agricultural machinery such as tractors, rice transplanters, and combine harvesters, thereby increasing farming efficiency. In the future, if multiple agricultural robots work together, it will be necessary for farmers to monitor the robots and manage them remotely to increase the efficiency of farming and ensure the safety of the robotic operation. Therefore, we developed a remote monitoring system for agricultural robots, which functions as a database server that retains the operating history of the machines and a Web server to display machine status and report any trouble. We tested the operational and status-viewing performance of this system by using a head-feeding combine robot. The combine robot harvested the rice crop in a field, and wirelessly sent data on its position, status, and any trouble to the database server via a smartphone. The database server received and recorded the data, and the farmer was able to remotely access the Web server to monitor the status of the combine robot by using a smartphone or a personal computer. The Web server displays the position, status, and occurrence of any trouble for the combine robot by using Google Maps software and various GUIs that are accessed from a Web browser. Our results suggest that the remote monitoring system is an effective tool for management of the robot.
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