Experimental robotics system in laboratory for agriculture application

Abstract

In centuries past, humanity’s destiny in agriculture was depended fully on weather, irrigation and soil, but nowadays, with the sophisticated and highly technologies, the ability for humans and machines to cooperate as an integrated team will determine the success to increase and sustain agricultural production in future. The warm, humid and closed conditions in especially in greenhouse are very unfriendly for humans to work in and they are worsened when fertilisers and pesticides are being applied. The infusion of advance technology in mechanisation, automation, environmental controls and in-house mechanisation for crop production in the tropics and sub tropics are important for the development of agriculture and food sectors and is most beneficial to humanity. Malaysia imports agricultural products and processed food worth RM12 billion annually. To experimentally study the locomotion of robot in the laboratory, one has to create a motion environment. In order to study simulations motion of robotics joints, microgravity environments have its best condition to be set up to facilitate the experiments. To set up the microgravity on earth requires some method of compensation for the earth’s gravitational field. To accurately produce an earth-based zero gravity condition test-bed is impossible through experimentation. The main objective of this research work is to build a test-bed for robot that operates in the "zero gravity" situation. To achieve this, gravity-less 2 Degrees-Of-Freedom robot with a unique instrumental arrangement will be considered to compensate the gravity force and provide the drag-free and near zero gravity characteristics of space in two dimensions for the robot arms. The robot kinematics and dynamics formulations are studied especially the Newton-Euler formulation. This paper mainly discusses the feedbacks of the robot’s arms using mechanical simulation and virtual prototyping software, Mechanical Desktop 4 combined with MSC Working Model as well as the hardware design. These data are very important to verify the formulation or algorithm are correct and suitable in robotics optimum designs. The robotics technology is very important in the future agriculture development especially to substitute man-power since the agriculture and food industry sectors have been identified as the third engine of growth of the national economy, the government had emphasized the need for new approach in agriculture modernisation to help the industry become more productive and competitive in the global economy.