• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.31 no.1
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• pp.43-50
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• 2014

This paper introduces a robot platform which can do weeding while traveling between rice seedlings stably against irregular land surface of a paddy field. Also, an autonomous navigation technique that can track on stable state without any damage of the seedlings in the working area is proposed. Detection of the rice seedlings and avoidance knocking down by the robot platform is achieved by the sensor fusion of a laser range finder (LRF) and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). These sensors are also used to control navigating direction of the robot to keep going along the column of rice seedling consistently. Deviation of the robot direction from the rice column that is sensed by the LRF is fed back to a proportional and derivative controller to obtain stable adjustment of navigating direction and get proper returning speed of the robot to the rice column.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.141-150
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• 2000

This study was carried out to de develop a control strategy of a fruit harvesting redundant robot. The method of generating a safe trajectory, which avoids collisions with obstracles such as branches or immature fruits, in the 3D(3-dimension) space using artificial potential field technique and virtual plane concept was proposed. Also, the method of setting reference velocity vectors to follow the trajectory and to avoid obstacles in the 3D space was proposed. Developed methods were verified with computer simulations and with actual robot tests. Fro the actual robot tests, a machine vision system was used for detecting fruits and obstacles, Results showed that developed control method could reduce the occurrences of the robot manipulator located in the possible collision distance. with 10 virtual obstacles generated randomly in the 3 D space, maximum rates of the occurrences of the robot manipulator located in the possible collision distance, 0.03 m, from the obstacles were 8 % with 5 degree of freedom (DOF), 8 % with 6-DOF, and 4% with 7-DOF, respectively.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.391-398
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• 2001

A robot system for clone replication and gridding, which is a preliminary state of the genome research, was developed and evaluated its performance. This gridding robot system consisted of 1) a gridding heat that replicated the clone, 2) a manipulator, as a part of body of robot, which transferred the gridding head along x-, y-, z-axis, 3) a well plate arranging board, 4) a sterilization unit, and 5) a control unit. Performance of the system was evaluated with 1) repeatability of the robot system, 2) clone replication efficiency, 3) time requirement of the replication, and 4) sterilization efficiency. The repeatability error of the robot system showed 0.219 mm and 0.094 mm in the direction of x- and y-axis, respectively. The success rate of the clone replication with the gridding head was 100% on the membrane filter. The time required for the replication was four minutes and fifty-five seconds from the four 96 well plates to a 384 well plate meanwhile the required time with well experienced hand labor was three minutes thirty-five seconds. The gridding operation of clone could not be done by hand labor and the required time with robot system for the gridding on the membrance filter with the control program 5$\times$5: 1 copy and 384 gridding pins was twenty minutes and twenty-five seconds. The efficiency of the sterilization was considered to be satisfactory since no growth of fungi was found around the area of replication in the membrane filter.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.421-441
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• 2021

Fruit detection in orchards is one of the most crucial tasks for designing the visual system of an automated harvesting robot. It is the first and foremost tool employed for tasks such as sorting, grading, harvesting, disease control, and yield estimation, etc. Efficient visual systems are crucial for designing an automated robot. However, conventional fruit detection methods always a trade-off with accuracy, real-time response, and extensibility. Therefore, an improved method is proposed based on coarse-to-fine multitask cascaded convolutional networks (MTCNN) with three aspects to enable the practical application. First, the architecture of Fruit-MTCNN was improved to increase its power to discriminate between objects and their backgrounds. Then, with a few manual labels and operations, synthetic images and labels were generated to increase the diversity and the number of image samples. Further, through the online hard example mining (OHEM) strategy during training, the detector retrained hard examples. Finally, the improved detector was tested for its performance that proved superior in predicted accuracy and retaining good performances on portability with the low time cost. Based on performance, it was concluded that the detector could be applied practically in the actual orchard environment.

• Journal of the Korean Society for Precision Engineering
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• v.27 no.9
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• pp.34-42
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• 2010

Agricultural automation has become more and more important by environmental change. The automation demands the highest technology due to the ever changing various conditions in agriculture system. In the paper, semi-autonomous pesticide spray robot system has been developed for rose farming in the glass house. The robot is in autonomous mode during pesticide spraying process driven on pipe rail. The robot is manually driven while moving from a rail to the next rail. The drive platform and autonomous operation control system are developed based on IT fusion technology. The pesticide spray system is also developed with nozzles and booms for precision mist spray system. Experimental data of nozzle test is also included.

• Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.54-58
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• 2005

In this study, tele-robotics was researched to actualize robots in agriculture. The robot system consisted of a data collecting robot, several robots that performed their own agricultural operations, a server, client computers and networks between robots and computers. In this paper, as a first step, harvesting experiments were carried out. From the results, it was observed that the tele-robotics had feasibility to propel the robotization in agriculture. The tele-robotics has advantages not only that human workers are released from the severe working environment but also that the greenhouse can be monitored and controlled anytime and anywhere.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.749-754
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• 2021

In order to solve problems such as a decrease in the agricultural population and an aging population, research on agricultural robots is being actively conducted for the purpose of automating various agricultural tasks. The harvesting process is the most labor-intensive process among farm work and this process consumes about 2-3 times more compared to other processes. Since the transport of agricultural crops requires the most labor costs and there is a risk of injury during the operation, automating the transport operation through an agricultural robot can improve safety and significantly improve productivity. Therefore, this paper proposes an agricultural robot that is optimized for farm worksites and capable of autonomous driving.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 2000.11c
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• pp.690-697
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• 2000

The objective of this study is to develop a method that is able to realize autonomous traveling for tractor-like robot on the slope terrain. A neural network (NN) and genetic algorithms (GAs) have been used for resolving nonlinear problems in this system. The NN is applied to create a vehicle simulator that is capable to describe the motion of the tractor robot on the slope, while it is impossible by the common dynamics way. Using this vehicle simulator, a control law optimized by GAs was established and installed in the computer to control the steering wheel of tractor robot. The autonomous traveling carried out on a 14-degree slope had initial successful results.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.273-284
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• 2018

Purpose: Conventional headland turning typically requires repeated forward and backward movements to move the farming equipment to the next row. This research focuses on developing an upland agricultural robot with an optimized headland turning mechanism that enables a $180^{\circ}$ turning positioning to the next row in one steering motion designed for a two-wheel steering, four-wheel drive agricultural robot named the HADA-bot. The proposed steering mechanism allows for faster turnings at each headland compared to those of the conventional steering system. Methods: The HADA-bot was designed with 1.7-m wide wheel tracks to travel along the furrows of a garlic bed, and a look-ahead path following algorithm was applied using a real-time kinematic global positioning system signal. Pivot turning tests focused primarily on accuracy regarding the turning radius for the next path matching, saving headland turning time, area, and effort. Results: Several test cases were performed by evaluating right and left turns on two different surfaces: concrete and soil, at three speeds: 1, 2, and 3 km/h. From the left and right side pivot turning results, the percentage of lateral deviation is within the acceptable range of 10% even on the soil surface. This U-turn scheme reduces 67% and 54% of the headland turning time, and 36% and 32% of the required headland area compared to a 50 hp tractor (ISEKI, TA5240, Ehime, Japan) and a riding-type cultivator (CFM-1200, Asia Technology, Deagu, Rep. Korea), respectively. Conclusion: The pivot turning trajectory on both soil and concrete surfaces achieved similar results within the typical operating speed range. Overall, these results prove that the pivot turning mechanism is suitable for improving conventional headland turning by reducing both turning radius and turning time.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
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• 1993.10a
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• pp.850-858
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• 1993

Germinatin and early growth of tobacco seedlings in trays containing many cells is increasing in popularity . Since 100 % germination is not likely , a major problem is to locate and replace the content of those cells which contain either no seedling or a stunted seedling with a plug containing a viable seedling. Empty cells and seedlings of poor quality take up valuable space in a greenhouse. They may also cause difficulty when transplanting seedlings into the field. Robotic technology, including the implementation of computer vision, appears to be an attractive alternative to the use of manual labor for accomplishing this task. Operating AGBOT, short for Agricultural ROBOT, involved four steps : (1) capturing the image, (2) processing the image, (3) moving the manipulator, (4) working the gripper. This research seedlings within a cell-grown environment. the configuration of the cell-grown seedling environment dictated the design of a Cartesian robot suitable for working ov r a flat plane. Experiments of AGBOT performance in transferring large seedlings produced trays which were more than 98% survived one week after transfer. In general , the system generated much better than expected.