Lightweight Long-Reach 5-DOF Robot Arm for Farm Application

Crop monitoring is frequently used by crop scientists to observe growth of plants and to relate plants phenotypes to their genotypes. Instead of traditional crop monitoring, which is labor intensive, high-throughput plant phenotyping (HTP) platforms using ground-based vehicle have several advantages over manual methods. Existing HTP platforms with robot arms has limited reach and payload, and they are sometimes not appropriate for monitoring large fields. In this research, a 5-DOF robot arm is developed and analyzed for monitoring several crops growth. This robot arm is a hybrid of both prismatic and rotational joints. This new mobile manipulator is light, has a compact structure, suitable for plant phenotyping, and doesn’t exist commercially. To investigate the performance of the robot arm, kinematics and dynamics analyses using Newton-Euler iterative method and MATLAB simulations are performed. Results matched with each other very well.