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  • The Crops agricultural robot [Elektronski vir] : application to selective spraying of grapevineʼs diseases
    Oberti, Roberto ...
    In current viticulture, grapevineʼs protection is obtained by uniform spraying applications re-peated according to a regular calendar. This homogenous and continuous approach to crop protection can ... easily results in more than ten or fifteen treatments per season in several grapevine-growing areas. Nevertheless, rather than being uniformly diffused, primary infec-tions starts from localized discrete foci. There are then evident potential benefits connected to the development of a system able to detect initial infection foci and target treatments on them instead of the current homogenous and unselective sprayings. This would indeed inhib-it or decrease the spread-rate of the infection to wider patches in the vineyard, while enabling significant reduction in use of pesticides. Within the UE-project CROPS (Clever Robots for Crops), a modular and multifunctional agri-cultural robot system for specialty crops was developed and one of its applications is selec-tive spraying of disease foci. The robotic system set-up devoted to this task integrates a six degrees of freedom manipula-tor, an optical sensor system and a precision spraying actuator. The paper will describe the requirements of the system and its components and it will discuss the results obtained in experiments of selective spraying. As case study, powdery mildew (Erysiphe necator) on grapevine is considered, being one of the major diseases for this specialty crop. The automatic detection and selective spraying of grapevine canopy areas which exhibit dis-ease symptoms are based on optical sensing feedback, while the precision spraying end-effector is positioned by the robotic manipulator to selectively and accurately apply pesticides solely to disease foci. Optical disease detection and localization is based on on-the-go pro-cessing of images sensed by a multispectral (R-G-NIR) camera which inspects the entire structure of the grapevine canopy. As end effector on the manipulator arm, a precision spraying actuator is used. It is composed by an axial fan with a flow straightener and an axially mounted spraying nozzle. The sprayer can deliver an air-carrier flow with an adjustable velocity, producing a circular spraying pat-tern of a constant diameter of 0.15 m over a wide range of spraying distances (0.5 - 1.5 m). A first set of experiments was conducted in a greenhouse, where vineyard canopy conditions were recreated by aligning plants of grapevine grown in pots. Within the recreated canopy, diseased plants with different levels of disease symptoms were used as targets of automated selective spraying performed by the agricultural robot. The results of these experiments are discussed in view of a possible intelligent, close precision crop protection framework.
    Source: AgEng 2014 [Elektronski vir] : engineering for improving resource efficiency : conference of the European network for engineering and systems in the rural sector (F. 1-8)
    Type of material - conference contribution
    Publish date - 2014
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 13593627

    Link(s):

    http://www.geyseco.es/geystiona/adjs/comunicaciones/304/C06120001.pdf

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