Agrobot Gari, a multimodal robotic solution for blueberry production automation

Abstract

This paper presents a robotic system designed to replace manual labour in three prevalent activities related to blueberry management: soil sampling and analysis, weed spraying, and plant health status monitoring. A complex system for automating field activities in blueberry orchards that involves the use of ground and aerial robots, along with integrated route optimisation software, autonomous driving, image recognition based on AI, and others, was developed. The ground robot is made in a modular way, having three different add-on modules for the three distinct use cases it covers. A modular system guarantees the year-round utilisation of the robot across various growth stages of plants. This stands out as its major advantage, considering that many robotic systems are typically tailored to address a singular task. Robot modules utilise custom-made hardware for in-field sampling and real-time soil analysis, an industrial robotic arm with a custom-made system for spraying, and a plant health monitoring module consisting of two Plant-O-Meter™ optical devices capable of capturing sixteen optical vegetation indices in real-time. The solutions are tested and deployed in the real-world environment of the blueberry orchard. We have achieved 50–60 % savings on herbicides compared to blanket spraying, and the costs related to sub-optimal herbicide application are reduced up to 25 %. The costs of soil analysis have been significantly reduced to about 70 %.

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