Autonomous Mobile Plant Watering Robot : A Kinematic Approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an autonomous mobile robot for plant watering that combines computer vision, sensor integration, and advanced kinematics to efficiently detect, water, and track plants in real-time.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mobile watering robot with integrated sensors, real-time plant detection, and comprehensive kinematic modeling, enhancing mobility and functionality over existing solutions.

Findings

Successfully detects plants using YOLOv5 and real-time vision.

Performs precise watering with soil moisture sensors.

Demonstrates effective collision avoidance and plant tracking.

Abstract

Plants need regular and the appropriate amount of watering to thrive and survive. While agricultural robots exist that can spray water on plants and crops such as the , they are expensive and have limited mobility and/or functionality. We introduce a novel autonomous mobile plant watering robot that uses a 6 degree of freedom (DOF) manipulator, connected to a 4 wheel drive alloy chassis, to be able to hold a garden hose, recognize and detect plants, and to water them with the appropriate amount of water by being able to insert a soil humidity/moisture sensor into the soil. The robot uses Jetson Nano and Arduino microcontroller and real sense camera to perform computer vision to detect plants using real-time YOLOv5 with the Pl@ntNet-300K dataset. The robot uses LIDAR for object and collision avoideance and does not need to move on a pre-defined path and can keep track of which plants it has watered. We provide the Denavit-Hartenberg (DH) Table, forward kinematics, differential driving kinematics, and inverse kinematics along with simulation and experiment results