Agriculture is currently undergoing a robotics revolution, but robots using wheeled or treads suffer from known disadvantages: they are unable to move over rubble and steep or loose ground, and they trample continuous strips of land thereby reducing the viable crop area. Legged robots offer an alternative, but existing commercial legged robots are complex, expensive, and hard to maintain. We propose the use of multilegged robots using low-degree-of-freedom (low-DoF) legs and demonstrate our approach with a lawn pest control task: picking dandelions using our inexpensive and easy to fabricate BigANT robot. For this task we added an RGB-D camera to the robot. We also rigidly attached a flower picking appendage to the robot chassis. Thanks to the versatility of legs, the robot could be programmed to perform a ``swooping'' motion that allowed this 0-DoF appendage to pluck the flowers. Our results suggest that robots with six or more low-DoF legs may hit a sweet-spot for legged robots designed for agricultural applications by providing enough mobility, stability, and low complexity.
翻译:目前,农业正在经历机器人革命,但使用轮式或脚踏板的机器人正经历着已知的不利条件:他们无法跨过瓦砾和陡峭或松散的地面,践踏连续的地块,从而缩小了可生存的作物面积。 腿上的机器人提供了一种替代办法,但现有的商业腿上的机器人是复杂、昂贵和难以维持的。 我们提议使用低度自由(低度自由)腿(低度自由)腿使用多腿的机器人,并展示我们用草坪控制害虫的任务: 利用我们廉价和容易制造的大型ANT机器人来采摘花。 对于这项任务,我们增加了 RGB-D 相机给机器人。 我们还严格地将花朵绑在机器人的底部。 由于双腿的多功能性,机器人可以被设计出一个“ 刷花” 动作, 使这个0- DoF 的附件能够采花花。 我们的结果表明, 6个或6个或6个以上低度低度低度的脚的机器人可以找到一个甜点, 用来进行农业应用的腿的机器人。