Design and development of an automated band wrapper robot for grapevine pest control

Abstract

With a view toward enhancing pest control and achieving organic requirements in wine industry, development of a prototypical autonomous vehicle that automatically applies a band barrier on grapevine is detailed in this paper. A novel band wrapper mechanism is proposed in this work. The band wrapper serving as the carrier for pest control is applied by the vehicle's six-degree-of-freedom articulator real-time controlled through classical inverse kinematics. It is found in the laboratory that the automated band wrapper robot can successfully detect a rod-like object and optimally place the band wrapper on the desired location for pest control.