Application of the Agricultural Robot for Weed Control

Currently, most fields in farms are sprayed with herbicides. Moreover, they affect the entire field, including food crops. Crops usually do not die from selective herbicides, but even with correctly selected types, their growth is suppressed, which negatively affects the harvest. Agriculture needs a more balanced and well-developed approach to selection of cultivated varieties, herbicides or other methods of crop protection. This is important, since new types of weeds resistant to glyphosate. Our robot is designed to pull out weeds, place them in the container so that their seeds cannot give new shoots in the fields. A high-precision manipulator for capturing weeds, machine vision are the main advantages of our robot. With the help of the convolutional neural network, our robot detects weeds and distinguishes them from agricultural plants. The aim is to highlight the advantages of using the robot in the fight against weeds. According to our results, the robot is inferior to herbicide treatments in terms of weed control effectiveness. This may be due to the low productivity of the certain robot, and insufficient accuracy of weed recognition. Nevertheless, the robot wins in terms of compliance with organic farming.