Autonomous Navigation in Rubber Plantations

Abstract

Agriculture is the main revenue resource of many states of India. But due to new opportunities and higher pays the strength of the labour community is getting greatly reduced. Since the farming community is unable to sustain continuation of farming, the corporate world in now becoming the caretaker of the agricultural industry. This has lead to a new era of agriculture. Today’s agriculture needs to find new ways to improve efficiency. The key point here is to replace the labourers with intelligent machines. One way to achieve this goal is to utilize available robotics and artificial intelligence technologies in the form of smarter intelligent machines to reduce energy inputs in more effective ways. These machines should be able to work like humans in farms and produce results equal to or higher than the existing ones. The advent of autonomous system architecture gives us the opportunity to develop a complete new range of agricultural equipment based on smart machines. By using these machines we can increase the productivity, improve safety, and reduce costs for many agricultural purposes. The author proposes the development of a machine which can autonomously navigate through rubber plantations with obstacle detection capabilities. Sub tasks like tapping and latex collection can be attached to this and can be utilized to improve the efficiency and reduce the cost of production of natural rubber.