I-Weed Robot : un robot autoguidé pour un désherbage localisé

We present the development of an autonomous robot, called I-Weed Robot (Intelligent Weed Robot), which aims at reducing herbicides in crop fields (maize, sunflower…). Using a high precision positioning signal (RTK) to locate the robot in the field, a Kalman filter and a proportional-integral-derivative controller (PID controller) allows adjusting the orientation and the speed of the robot depending on a predefined trajectory. As for the specific spraying system, a commercial system is used (weedseeker, Trimble) where the plant detection is obtained by an optical sensors just before to spray specifically on them. The performance of the guidance algorithm using numerical simulations (virtual …