Rasmus Nyholm Jørgensen

Autonomous Systems for Plant Protection

Advances in automation are demanded by the market mainly as a response to high labor costs. Robotic outdoor systems are ready to allow not only economically viable operations but also increased efficiency in agriculture, horticulture and forestry. The aim of this chapter is to give examples of autonomous operations related to crop protection probably commercially available in the near future. Scouting and monitoring together with the efficient application of chemicals or mechanical treatments are operations which can be successful automated. Drawbacks are that current systems are lacking robust and safe behaviors. In general the potential of saving e.g. of herbicides are huge when high precision targeting based on individual weed plant detections is used.

Robotic weed monitoring

Abstract In this paper, an integrated management system for the planning and activation of a field monitoring task is presented. The architecture of the system is built around a mobile robotic unit. The internet-based architecture of the system includes a station unit that works as a mobile on-farm operating console, the mobile robotic unit and a field server for generating and storing maps. The hypothesis is that it is possible to automate the planning and execution of the operation of monitoring the in-field weed density and species distribution. The developed planning system includes the automatic field geometrical representation and the route planning for the mobile unit. For the field representation two algorithmic approaches for automated track generation were used. For the route planning, a graph-based field coverage algorithm and a discrete grid-based path planning method were used. The low computational requirements of the implemented algorithms make it feasible to adopt a real-time re-planning strategy in which a set of new planning problems are solved based on the latest information. The central part of such a planning, concerns the dynamic re-evaluation of the initial plan for sampling and routing based on the on-line analysis of the samples. This provides the basis for a fully sequential adaptive adjustment of the sampling procedure after each individual sampling. It is expected that such a dynamic targeted sampling and routing system will reduce the overall cost and time consumption of the weed monitoring operation.

Maintaining Trust While Fixated to a Rehabilitative Robot

This paper investigates the trust relationship between humans and a rehabilitation robot, the RoboTrainer. We present a study in which participants let the robot guide their arms through a series of preset coordinates in a 3D space. Each participant interact with the robot twice, one time where participants hold on to the robotic arm, and a second time where participants are fixated to the robotic arm. Our findings show that in general participants did not feel more insecure when fixated to the robot. However, when the robot arm moves close to participants and enter their intimate space, or when the robot moves out into an outer position participants display significantly more signs of fear opposed to when the robot arm is in a normal position.