Enhanced Robots as Tools for Assisting Agricultural Engineering Students’ Development

Dimitrios Loukatos,Ioannis-Vasileios Kyrtopoulos,Maria Kondoyanni,Konstantinos G. Arvanitis

doi:10.3390/electronics11050755

Dimitrios Loukatos, Ioannis-Vasileios Kyrtopoulos + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11050755

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Journal: Electronics	Publication Date: Mar 1, 2022
Citations: 7	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Agricultural University of Athens

Abstract

Inevitably, the rapid growth of the electronics industry and the wide availability of tailored programming tools and support are accelerating the digital transformation of the agricultural sector. The latter transformation seems to foster the hopes for tackling the depletion and degradation of natural resources and increasing productivity in order to cover the needs of Earth’s continuously growing population. Consequently, people getting involved with modern agriculture, from farmers to students, should become familiar with and be able to use and improve the innovative systems making the scene. At this point, the contribution of the STEM educational practices in demystifying new areas, especially in primary and secondary education, is remarkable and thus welcome, but things become quite uncertain when trying to discover efficient practices for higher education, and students of agricultural engineering are not an exception. Indeed, university students are not all newcomers to STEM and ask for real-world experiences that better prepare them for their professional careers. Trying to bridge the gap, this work highlights good practices during the various implementation stages of electric robotic ground vehicles that can serve realistic agricultural tasks. Several innovative parts, such as credit card-sized systems, AI-capable modules, smartphones, GPS, solar panels, and network transceivers are properly combined with electromechanical components and recycled materials to deliver technically and educationally meaningful results.

Highlights

Received: 26 January 2022New technologies that continuously appear have a strong impact on people’s lives, reshaping the professional sectors; even the farming sector has been altered during the last years, exploiting new techniques for agricultural production, such as IoT, automation systems, and robotics
Due to the heterogeneity of the participating people and the occasional spacial and temporal constraints caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, not all the students had to contribute to the same degree in the implementation of these robots
Two basic variants of experimental robotic vehicles were discussed, one for facilitating the fruit harvesting process by carrying a plastic pallet bin and automatically following the farmer, and another for autonomous spraying over the plants while performing, in parallel, plant scouting operations using a precise thermal camera module

Summary

Introduction

New technologies that continuously appear have a strong impact on people’s lives, reshaping the professional sectors; even the farming sector has been altered during the last years, exploiting new techniques for agricultural production, such as IoT, automation systems, and robotics. Agricultural robots’ acceptability increased in the COVID-19 era due to the labor shortage and social distancing [2], the need for robots will not be temporary and will affect the fruit and vegetable production methods post-pandemic [3]. As indicated by teams of experts such as the USA National Research Council, agricultural education should assist in the creation of a 21st-century workforce able to address many of the modern critical economic and environmental challenges [4]. The most important of the pillars of Agriculture 5.0, such as programming, networking, global positioning systems (GPS), enhanced data processing, interconnection, autonomy, artificial intelligence (AI), human–robot interaction, and the use of smart devices [5], are present in a modern.

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