Design and fabrication of an agricultural robot for crop seeding

Abstract Crop seeding is a time-consuming and tedious activity for farmers and is only exacerbated in large agriculture fields. Manually sowing seeds by hand is a highly inefficient process that requires a lot of human effort and can lead to health concerns for farmers, while spreading seedlings using tractors results in a high wastage of seedlings. This research paper describes the development of a low-cost agricultural robot for crop seeding. The prototype system consists of two parts, namely a mobile base for robot movement and a seeding mechanism attached to the mobile base for crop seeding application. The mobile base has a four-wheel design to ease movement on uneven terrains, while the seeding mechanism uses the concept of a crank-slider to continuously inject seedlings into the ground. Crop seeding tests show that the robot is able to sow 138 seedlings in 5 min, with an accuracy of 92%, compared to 102 seedlings by human workers. This demonstrates an increase in the crop seeding efficiency of over 35%. As for the battery life test, it was determined that the robot can function for up to 4 h on a single charge. Thus, there will not be an increase in the operation time and reduction in the efficiency of the crop seeding process due to the recharging times when human workers are replaced with the prototype system. The recharging duration for the robot power supply is 1.5 h. While the prototype system has successfully achieved its objective of reducing human interference, labour requirement, and the overall operating costs in the field of agriculture for crop seeding process, by making the robot fully autonomous, using either a rail- or line-following system, labour costs can be further reduced as an operator is not required to manually steer the robot to each seeding path.