Low-Cost Robot for Agricultural Image Data Acquisition

Gustavo José Querino Vasconcelos, Gabriel Schubert Ruiz Costa, Thiago Vallin Spina and Helio Pedrini ()
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Gustavo José Querino Vasconcelos: Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, Brazil
Gabriel Schubert Ruiz Costa: The Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), Campinas 13083-100, Brazil
Thiago Vallin Spina: Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, Brazil
Helio Pedrini: Institute of Computing, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Campinas 13083-852, Brazil

Agriculture, 2023, vol. 13, issue 2, 1-16

Abstract: More sustainable technologies in agriculture are important not only for increasing crop yields, but also for reducing the use of agrochemicals and improving energy efficiency. Recent advances rely on computer vision systems that differentiate between crops, weeds, and soil. However, manual dataset capture and annotation is labor-intensive, expensive, and time-consuming. Agricultural robots provide many benefits in effectively performing repetitive tasks faster and more accurately than humans, and despite the many advantages of using robots in agriculture, the solutions are still often expensive. In this work, we designed and built a low-cost autonomous robot (DARob) in order to facilitate image acquisition in agricultural fields. The total cost to build the robot was estimated to be around $ 850 . A low-cost robot to capture datasets in agriculture offers advantages such as affordability, efficiency, accuracy, security, and access to remote areas. Furthermore, we created a new dataset for the segmentation of plants and weeds in bean crops. In total, 228 RGB images with a resolution of 704 × 480 pixels were annotated containing 75.10% soil area, 17.30% crop area and 7.58% weed area. The benchmark results were provided by training the dataset using four different deep learning segmentation models.

Keywords: autonomous robots; agriculture; data acquisition; computer vision (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
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