Hefty: A Modular Reconfigurable Robot for Advancing Robot Manipulation in Agriculture

TL;DR

Hefty is a modular, reconfigurable robot platform designed for agricultural manipulation tasks, enabling flexible configurations to reduce costs and facilitate technology transfer from research to practical applications.

Contribution

The paper introduces Hefty, a novel modular robot platform with detailed design and integration, supporting multiple configurations for agricultural robotics.

Findings

Demonstrated five different configurations in real-world applications

Showed modularity reduces costs and enhances flexibility

Validated utility across diverse agricultural tasks

Abstract

This paper presents a modular, reconfigurable robot platform for robot manipulation in agriculture. While robot manipulation promises great advancements in automating challenging, complex tasks that are currently best left to humans, it is also an expensive capital investment for researchers and users because it demands significantly varying robot configurations depending on the task. Modular robots provide a way to obtain multiple configurations and reduce costs by enabling incremental acquisition of only the necessary modules. The robot we present, Hefty, is designed to be modular and reconfigurable. It is designed for both researchers and end-users as a means to improve technology transfer from research to real-world application. This paper provides a detailed design and integration process, outlining the critical design decisions that enable modularity in the mobility of the robot as well as its sensor payload, power systems, computing, and fixture mounting. We demonstrate the utility of the robot by presenting five configurations used in multiple real-world agricultural robotics applications.