Autonomous arecanut tree climbing and pruning robot

This paper presents the design and development of a versatile autonomous tree climbing & pruning robot for arecanut farming. The robot has a linear frictional force based non-linear self-regulatory system with 9 DOF that adapts itself to changing trunk diameter. The robot chassis is made rigid and light-weight. An on-board battery is the power source. The motion is provided by two DC motors fitted to spiked wheels. A 5 DOF PUMA arm is mounted on the robot for cutting and pruning purpose. The intelligence is based on Digital Image Processing using Object Recognition techniques. Machine vision is through a guiding camera mounted over the Robotic Arm that feeds the OMAP 32bit Micro-controller made of ARM CORTEX-M3 and Da Vinci processor which has Wavelet based JPEG compression and noise elimination module. A manual override with a display screen allows user to view and control the robot when necessary.