SPARROW: Smart Precision Agriculture Robot for Ridding of Weeds

TL;DR

This paper presents SPARROW, an autonomous, vision-based robot for precision weed control that detects weeds, plans spray trajectories, and navigates crop rows to reduce chemical use in agriculture.

Contribution

Introduction of a cost-effective, integrated autonomous system combining weed detection, trajectory planning, and navigation for precision agriculture.

Findings

Effective weed detection and spraying demonstrated

System reduces chemical usage in weed control

Autonomous navigation aligns with crop rows

Abstract

The advancements in precision agriculture are vital to support the increasing demand for global food supply. Precision spot spraying is a major step towards reducing chemical usage for pest and weed control in agriculture. A novel spot spraying algorithm that autonomously detects weeds and performs trajectory planning for the sprayer nozzle has been proposed. Furthermore, this research introduces a vision-based autonomous navigation system that operates through the detected crop row, effectively synchronizing with an autonomous spraying algorithm. This proposed system is characterized by its cost effectiveness that enable the autonomous spraying of herbicides onto detected weeds.