Consideration of Constructing a Weed Detection Method for an Agricultural Robot in Perilla Fields

In recent years, the number of farmers in Japan has been decreasing, and the automation of agriculture using robots, AI, and IoT, known as “smart agriculture,” is being promoted. In this context, Toyama city is promoting a project to build a robot for automatic weeding between plants in a perilla fields. In this research, we are in charge of the system part that detects weeding regions and informs the weeding mechanism. In the field, a wide variety of weeds form vegetation, and it is necessary to prevent food crops from being cut. Therefore, we detect crop regions and the rest of the area should be the weeding regions. In this study, we construct a system to detect crop regions by transfer learning the object detection model YOLO-v8, which is a convolutional neural network (CNN), and evaluate the system in terms of detection accuracy and processing speed.