Development and evaluation of a low-cost delta robot system for weed control applications in organic farming

Abstract

To secure the food supply for future generations it is necessary to increase the automation level in agriculture significantly. One particular problem especially in organic farming is the weeding process. Nowadays the weeding is mostly done by human workers. However this manual weeding is far too expensive and very inhomogeneous. Hence the manual weeding should be replaced by an automated solution. In general a weed control robot system comprises a weed classification and a weed elimination unit. In this paper the development and evaluation of a low-cost delta robot for weed elimination is presented. The performance of the delta robot is illustrated by experimental results.