Agribot I

Agribot I

One man's trash is another man's treasure! We've been playing around with electric wheelchairs for a few years now and part of the problem we've had is in getting the parts we wanted for our prototypes. You can find these things all over ebay in the $150 range with the only problem being that the sellers want you to pick them up and they're not nearby.  We started making some simple offers like: "Ship us the wheels and motors and you can keep the rest of the chair" - and voila: an aftermarket for government sponsored healthcare is born!

We're going to take you through the process of converting these parts into a programmable agricultural robot. The goal of this project is to have the agribot automatically navigate up and down a vineyard or field while spraying and pruning the plants.

Most electric wheelchairs will operate from two 12V batteries(24V total) located in the base of the chair.  We're going to operate the system off a single 6V golf cart battery because we don't need it to go very fast but we do want it to last a whole season on as few charges as possible.  Since we're operating on a relatively flat surface and we won't have 24V to operate the solenoid brakes on the motors, the first thing we're going to do is remove the electric brakes on the back of each motor(search for youtube video on how to do this). (if you are operating on a slope, you might want to keep the brakes and operate your system at a voltage high enough to disengage them).  The motors won't turn until these brakes are activated or removed.

The second thing we're going to do is attach the motors/wheels to a board (or use an existing wheel base). We'll be experimenting with ultrasonic sensors to detect the distance of the agribot from the vines.  We will likely use GPS to navigate and Wi-Fi to program and activate(or override) the agribot.  We also hope to integrate a battery powered sprayer and pruning attachment.  If you decide to build your own agribot, it's important that you operate it in a fenced or caged environment since a robot of this size with a pruning arm and fungicidal spraying attachment isn't a toy.