Automatically balanced structure for minimally invasive monitoring rover

Abstract

Due to the great advance of technology, the field is no longer treated as a space limited only to rustic and manual techniques of cultivation to become the scene of several applications of technologies of the last century. In this way, robotics has shown promising results when applied in the field, but it requires greater advances to assure the robustness and safety in a work environment so susceptible to changes and unpredictability, either by the action of weather or by the poorly controlled terrain.In addition, the environmental, economic, population, and technological factors are favorable circumstances for the increased investment in research and development applied in agriculture. As a result, the Mobile Robotics Laboratory (LabRoM) of the School of Engineering of São Carlos (EESC-USP) has been developing, since 2010, mobile robotics projects, both terrestrial and aerial, with the objective of working in the agricultural area. In this context, this project aims to develop a dynamically balanced structure for application in the agricultural environment, capable of self-balancing on a robotic platform. Such design allows the access of the analysis tool to a sufficient height to inspect the leaves of a corn plantation, whose height can reach more than 2 meters, besides allowing a height of operation for equipment like GPS that have their operation highlighted due to a better exposure to radio waves.This new self-balancing Rover concept enables the achievement of a better operating height without the need to increase the base area of the robotic platform, reducing the farming intervention and decreasing the vibration to the data acquisition equipment, while overcoming different slopes of the land, avoiding the tipping of the system. (AU)