Development of Agricultural Chemicals Injection Robot

Growing garden products involves a lot of work, such as harvesting, which is difficult to mechanize. Garden product crops require longer working hour compared with rice. We are developing a robot performing soil sterilization aimed at preventing repeated cultivation disorder. This robot is a medicinal solution injection robot injecting chloropicrin to use for soil sterilization automatically. The developed robot is driven by oil pressure actuators, runs on crawlers, with an chemical injector mounted in front of the robot. The robot is equipped with a gyroscopic sensor and a triangular surveying sensor. The robot covers entire working soil area with a combination of straight lines along which the position and orientation of the robot is compensated by the output from the sensors. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate that the robot can navigate on the uneven and soft terrain within required position errors.