Design of a Hybrid Locomotion Mobile Manipulator for Agricultural Application

The field of robotics in agriculture has gained momentum in the use of precision agriculture, minimizing pollution and maximizing production by replacing human labor with robots. The robots can improve the farm management through yield monitoring, field and crop development inspection, precision fertilization, crop health monitoring, crop diagnostics, crop pest prevention and control, soil moisture measurement, diagnosis/remediation early detection of possible crop compromises and end-of-season production estimation. Most locomotion systems for agricultural robots are wheeled, 4WD type, but wheeled systems are heavily affected by local terrain features such as rocks and branches and the constant locomotion of these robots throughout the farm results in a high rate of soil compaction. As an alternative, in this paper, the design of a mobile manipulator with hybrid locomotion will be discussed.