Project Brief

CSRL has developed a versatile robotic spraying platform, primarily aimed for pesticide application in greenhouses, which, through a series of simple modifications, can also be adapted for disinfection tasks in indoor settings. The prototype is built around a skid-steered wheeled platform driven by a pair of DC motors, and is equipped with an electronically controlled sprayer unit that is mounted on a pan/tilt robot arm for directing the spray. The robot can be operated either manually or in AGV mode, utilizing a magnetic guide sensor to track a predefined path, along with a depth camera and ultrasonic sensors for obstacle detection. The robot’s control architecture employs a central Single Board Computer running ROS, with peripheral functions allocated to three 8-bit microcontrollers. Closed loop flow regulation schemes have been developed to provide precision variable application rate of the sprayed agents, combined with motion control strategies of the pan/tilt unit to implement rectangular coverage spraying.