Design and kinematic modeling of a mobile manipulator with hybrid locomotion for agricultural applications

Abstract

In agriculture, one of the future solutions to eliminate the negative effect on the environment of the classical machineries is to use mobile robots. Small groups of mobile robots will interact with each other in order to inspect, to process or to harvest crops. These robots will have to work in a changing environment, in terms of terrain or road surfaces, the light of the ambient, animals, etc., aspects that will pose challenges for mobile robots. To facilitate the use of robots in agriculture, they must have a simple construction, be extremely reliable, flexible and, last but not least, cheap. These aspects have as effect new challenges for robot manufacturers to find technical solutions to meet the mentioned requirements. In this paper, a conceptual design and modeling of a mobile manipulator with hybrid locomotion, which may be used in agriculture for applications, such as tilling, seeding, weeding, etc, will be discussed.