Collision identification in weeding robot with acceleration standard deviation

Abstract

Recently, in the background such as the organic agriculture has been focused for healthy life, a weeding robot for a rice field, called “Aigamo robot”, has developed in our research group. It stirs soil by moving on the rice field, and prevent weed seedling from establishing. For controlling it in autonomously, it needs to identify if it is at an edge on the field and makes a turn. However, GPS (Global Positioning System) module does not give us enough accuracy for the above identification. On the other hand, ultrasound sensors cannot use because the robot works in muddy soil which absorbs ultrasonic. Therefore, in this research, we develop a collision identification method by identifying if the robot is in motion or not with the acceleration sensor, and verify it in an actual rice field.