Rowbot

Inspiration

The source of inspiration for building Rowbot stems from a strong dislike of driving tractors through orchards as a part-time job.

What is a Rowbot?

Rowbot is an autonomous rover that will navigate through orchards, spraying weeds in a controlled fashion.

How is it built?

The spraying module is composed of an Arduino, two MG996R servo motors, and an LED. The module is programmed using C++ and Python. The Python side of the program uses OpenCV to detect weeds in a video, then sharing the weed's coordinates to the Arduino where they are translated to motor movement.

Challenges

The biggest challenge we ran into was interfacing a Python script with the Arduino over a serial communication. This brought hours of troubleshooting along with extensive research of serial communication between the different languages.

What's next?

Rowbot is still in a very early developmental stage. Next steps include building a rover, automating the rover using cameras and various sensors, and adapting our existing modules to the rover.

Built With

• arduino
• numpy
• opencv
• python