An Autonomous Hybrid Drone-Rover Vehicle for Weed Removal and Spraying Applications in Agriculture

TL;DR

This paper introduces an autonomous hybrid drone-rover vehicle designed for diverse agricultural tasks, combining the strengths of drones and rovers to improve weed removal and spraying efficiency across various terrains.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel hybrid vehicle that integrates drone and rover capabilities, addressing limitations of each for comprehensive agricultural applications.

Findings

Successfully avoids obstacles in agricultural environments

Effectively plucks weeds and sprays pesticides

Demonstrates versatility across different terrains

Abstract

The usage of drones and rovers helps to overcome the limitations of traditional agriculture which has been predominantly human-intensive, for carrying out tasks such as removal of weeds and spraying of fertilizers and pesticides. Drones and rovers are helping to realize precision agriculture and farmers with improved monitoring and surveying at affordable costs. Major benefits have come for vertical farming and fields with irrigation canals. However, drones have a limitation of flight time due to payload constraints. Rovers have limitations in vertical farming and obstacles like canals in agricultural fields. To meet the different requirements of multiple terrains and vertical farming in agriculture, we propose an autonomous hybrid drone-rover vehicle that combines the advantages of both rovers and drones. The prototype is described along with experimental results regarding its ability to avoid obstacles, pluck weeds and spray pesticides.