Mobile robots in greenhouse cultivation-Bozong Greenhouse

Mobile robots in greenhouse cultivation with planting technology

The applications of instrumental robotics are spreading every day to cover further domains, as the opportunity of replacing human operators provides effective solutions with return on investment. This is specially important when the duties, that need be performed, are potentially harmful for the safety or the health of the workers, or when more conservative issues are granted by robotics. Heavy chemicals or drugs dispensers, manure or fertilizers spreaders, etc. Are activities more and more concerned by the deployment of unmanned options.

Glasshouses, are characterized by small volumes of continuously recycled supporting resources, and have critical epidemic average ratios, enhanced by moisture and lighting continuance (for farming effectiveness) favoring the spread of bionic agents. Greenhouses are translucent glass or plastic constructions for hastening the growth of plants.

The distribution of plants inside greenhouses usually consists of an alternation of double rows of plants and narrow corridors for human operation and walkway. This kind of agricultural technique is massively used for intensive production of horticultural products in regions with adverse naturalclimatic conditions, since it allows a more effective use of water and daylight. The favorable atmosphere created inside greenhouses for plant growth causes pests and undesirable organisms to thrive as well, making necessary the use of pesticides and other chemical products that mustbe sprayed directly on the plants.Today solutions massively depend on heavy chemicals, plentifully distributed at given time intervals, making the greenhouse indoors highly toxic, with operator health shocks and forbidden re-entry long lasting delays.

Recent studies reported confirmation that spraying operations have hazardous effects on the health of knapsack sprayer human operators, who are specially exposed when working inside greenhouses, in conditions of high temperature and poor ventilation.

Therefore, the automation of spraying, as well as other greenhouse operations like monitoring and control of environmental conditions, harvest support, plant inspection, and artificial pollination, has a dramatic social and economical impact. In the recent past some few robotic solutions for greenhouse automation have been proposed.

The project suggested a robust and low cost robot for greenhouse operations, able to autonomously navigate in different kinds of greenhouses. The robotic system is tale-autonomous: in the sense that the remote supervision of autonomous tasks and shared human control are both viable. For the remote tale-operation station a video camera has also been included, so that images and sonar data are combined in a friendly operator interface. Another project for greenhouses automation is AGROBOT a mobile robot with a stereoscopic vision system and a six degree of freedom arm for the greenhouse cultivation of tomatoes. The head permits complete visibility of the overall area. A modular, easy to assemble, greenhouse suitable for incorporation into a lunar settlement has been proposed.

A semi autonomous robot acts as a tale factor system for crop harvesting. It is supported by twin tracks suspended from the ceiling. Other few similar projects have been funded in Japan. Mainly automation charges considered within this project, and discussed with the experts are:
- monitoring the growing health state;
- picking up samples of leaves from the plants suspected to be sick;
- fetching these samples to the laboratory;
- performing the spraying operations locally towards the plants acknowledged as sick;
- monitoring of the harmful chemical residuals within the greenhouse;
- assessing the re-entry safe time, after each spraying operation.

One of the main robot task is to analyses the plant to acknowledge its health state. To perform this function the symptoms evinced by the ill plants have to be considered and their effective recognition through censorial devices has to be verified. All the pathogenic agents that infest the plants change the look of the plants in different (more or less perceptible) ways. For this reason the robot vision system and algorithms are designed and tuned to take into account the great variety of symptomatic affecting the green of the leaves with evident rottenness or with spots nearly undetectable by the human eye. Studies performed in USA introduced a new method to analyses the plant health state, based on the light reflected when it is illuminated by rays of given wave length. This method should simplify the control system but, unfortunately, it is not applicable to different kind of cultivation. Intensive agriculture shall quite soon require investments and innovations to increase productivity and to protect natural resources for the coming generations. The problems dealt with are limited to applications for paleontologists treatments, specifically aiming at individual diagnostics and disease extirpation, in order to avoid the generalized spraying of poisonous stuffs.

In the Sixth Framework Program me, strong attention is posed to food related activities, with the aim to envisage efficient procedures and techniques for betterment of plants growth, while using Eco-compatible treatments and drugs. This general trend is particularly evident for the truck farming with glasshouse support and robotics will supply the instrumental aids to grant effectiveness, on condition that the incurring rigs provide low-price solutions with task-driven equipment. Moreover, the illustrated solution may be usefully employed for flowers, or other vegetables cultivation, so widening the spectrum of likely opportunities. Resort to Digital Mock-Ups allowed to perform dynamic and structural analyses in the early stages of the design process. Simulation campaigns assessed the fitting of the device, in order to grant safe and reliable tasks progression.

A life-cycle approach has been adopted for evaluating fall-offs during design, service, maintenance, dismantling phases while a mechanic thinking of the outfit aided to carry on a balanced solution among the several technical aspects, covering mechanics, control, sensing and informality.

greenhouse has 35 years of professional production of greenhouse history, in recent years, the company all staff's unremitting efforts, now developed into a professional conservatory company has some influence.

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