A Hardware and Software Modular Robot for the Agricultural Domain

In order to take full potential of robots in the agriculture, there is a need for robots that can operate across different domains and infrastructure. Agriculture is extremely diverse and no two farms are the same, so robots need to be able to adapt to a wide variety of farm layouts. There are several reasons for this. Firstly, there is great variation in the way the robot needs to loco mote, for example in muddy fields, concrete floors, grassland, or rails, just to mention a few. Secondly, spacing between the plants vary, so the size of the robots also needs to be adjustable depending on the farm layout as some farms can only fit smaller robots while other farms need larger robots for more efficient operation. In this paper, we therefore present a completely modular robot that can be configured to operate in all these environments. The robot can be assembled to different modes of locomotion and the size can be changed depending on the farm specifications. In addition, the robot software is developed so that it automatically takes the shape and the size of the robot into account in the kinematics and control.