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Corresponding Author

Mohamed Gouda Alkalla

Subject Area

Mechatronics

Article Type

Original Study

Abstract

Pesticide spraying in greenhouses is a dangerous process as the operator should wear protective suits and masks against the chemicals, which cause skin and eye irritation, respiratory issues, and even cancer. Other severe conditions involve elevated temperature and humidity in the confined greenhouse atmosphere. Therefore, this article proposes a novel teleoperated mobile robot for pesticide spraying called AMR-BPS to address such issues. It aims to keep the human securely outside during the spraying process. AMR-BPS has a novel design incorporating many innovative mechanisms, such as an extendable spraying boom, independent control of each spraying side, adjustable nozzle angles, and 2D-LiDAR for mapping/navigation. The article is mainly investigating the validity of the proposed design in terms of dynamics performance and controller design responses. This is accomplished by co-simulation of the system by MSC-ADAMS and MATLAB/SIMULINK. A PID controller is applied to control the robot speed, fitting the desired spraying rate, and the results of the simulation demonstrate the design validity. It validates the force analysis and actuation selection as well as showing stability and maintaining a constant navigation/spraying speed of 0.2 m/s at various soil coefficients of friction (mu=0.3-0.5). The controller's response to follow the reference speed of 0.2 m/s shows that the rise time is 0.04 s while the steady-state settling time is 0.07 s. In addition, the mapping and navigation are tested by using a dynamic simulation of Gazebo in ROS to simulate the robot mobility and LiDAR functionality, avoiding the surrounding obstacles.

Keywords

Pesticide Spraying, Plant Disease Detection, Spraying Nozzle Angle, Greenhouse Navigation

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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