While weeding plants by hand can be time-consuming and labor-consuming, spraying them with herbicide is by no means environmentally friendly. Now, a German consortium is developing a third option, the AMU-Bot weeding robot. The robot moves on caterpillar-like pedals, moving up and down lines of plants in orchards, vegetable patches or tree nurseries.
It uses an onboard LiDAR scanner to stop between these lines and turn around and follow the next line when it sees the end of each line.
Although amU-BOT can't identify specific types of plants, it can distinguish between crops and other plants that shouldn't be there -- namely weeds. When the latter is found, the robot lowers a rotating rake to stir up the soil and uproot the plants.
When dealing with weeds growing between rows, simply place the rake directly in front of the robot as it moves forward. On the other hand, if a weed grows between the plants in the row next to the robot, the machine will stop and move the rake sideways to the gap.
The AMU-BOT project was funded by the German Federal Agency for Agriculture and Food, and coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation. Bosch is developing the navigation and sensing systems for the robot, while KommTek, an agricultural robotics company, is developing the crawler drive system.
There is no word yet on when amU-Bot will become operational. But it may face some competition, as other organizations are developing robots that use lasers and electrical pulses to kill weeds.
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