Development of a spraying robot for precision agriculture: An edge following approach

This paper proposes several contributions to the development of an agricultural robot performing spraying task autonomously, in the framework of vineyard or orchard. Since an important point of such an application relies on the treatment of the vegetation while reducing the dissemination of hazardous chemical products, a control approach related to the detection of plants using Lidar is proposed for both controlling the robot motion and achieving spraying automation. A dedicated spraying device, allowing to (de)activate independently several nozzles has been designed and on-boarded on a mobile robot, following autonomously a detected structure (typically a row of trees). The synchronization of the sprayer and the robot with respect to the vegetation is ensured through an anticipative approach allowing to apply spraying on the vegetation pending on the robot motion.