A few days ago, we demoed different tools on the Agribot in a vineyard on a small farm. We tested both a fumigation and hedge trimmer tool by strapping it on to the Agribot, and then controlled it with motion sensing technology from a cell phone. Both of these tools worked successfully, although some tweaks may be necessary for the future.
A few days ago, we could finally build a prototype of the Agribot. It's based on a wheelchair, and we removed some hardware from our previous testing car and incorporated them into our agribot prototype.
The video below showcases the new joystick control of the Agribot.
The video below demonstrates successful GPS-guided movement in a circle.
The team demoed the agribot today at TI. (Juan, Guang, and Alex above)
Progress on the Android and iPhone apps is looking good as you can see
from the screen shot below. The collision avoidance worked "OK" in
this hallway - although the metal in the environment kept throwing off the
e-compass. The GPS was a little bit off - but in the right general location.
Our Agribot team has
been making good progress. In this video, Juan Wu(who has recently joined the
team) is putting obstacles in front of the small scale robot as it tries to
navigate to a specific GPS location. As you can see, there are still some
improvements to be made, but the bot keeps going.
Once the team is
satisfied with the performance of the small scale robot, the work will focus on
the larger scale robot in an agricultural setting(row crop). One of the
issues we're hoping won't be an issue in the field is e-compass error due to
metal in the environment.
