Development of Agri-Bot for Seed Sowing Automation

摘要

Agricultural robots have the potential to reduce human effort in farming sector. The additional benefit to be gained is enhanced production and better utilization of the land. A lot of research and development has already been done in this field, but mostly for larger fields. For the farmers having smaller land, owing to non-affordability of hired workers and machines, present practice is to perform ploughing and sowing manually. The requirement here is development of low cost, low maintenance agricultural machine that caters to the need of marginal farmers working single handedly. Smaller agricultural robots are also in developing stage and lot more needed to be done in this area. One of the major areas is automation in seed sowing process from ploughing the soil to covering it after seed sowing. In conventional seed sowing process, it is not easy to get proper seed spacing. Moreover, the process causes loss of precious seeds. The existing available machines such as seed drill does not allow change in the seed spacing required for different crops. Authors attempted to design an automatic mechanism for complete seed sowing operation that can cater to various crops with varied seed spacing, which can be done by a farmer with ease.