Assisting DIY Agricultural Robots Towards Their First Real-World Missions

During the last years, a plethora of technological advances have appeared, with a strong impact on people’s lives and works. In response to this dynamic, people getting involved with agricultural practices, like scientists, students and farmers, should become familiar with and able to exploit systems of cutting-edge characteristics. In this regard, this work reports on recent university laboratory efforts to design, implement, upgrade and test prototype do-it-yourself (DIY) agricultural robotic ground vehicles of convincing size, in a cost-effective manner, vehicles that will be capable for “real-world” missions. These efforts also aim to bridge the gap between native educational approaches and working commercial solutions and to lower the cost barriers. Two basic robotic variants, of diverse nature, are presented, one mainly for performing all-terrain soil-specific measurements and another for spraying over the crops. Both vehicles can be seen as “vanilla” platforms, customizable to support a rich set of light-duty agricultural field operations. The “core” of these robots consists of popular microcontrollers assisted by selected electronic components, like smart navigation and/or camera units. The “logic” of these robots has been developed using both visual and textual programming environments. The efficiency of the proposed robots has been evaluated via remote interaction scenarios carried out through Wi-Fi and LoRa radio interfaces, while the provision for solar panel assistance and for energy consumption measuring has also increased their functionality.