Mobile Robot Weeder and Harvester Prototype for Cotton Production

The U.S. cotton industry provided over 190,000 jobs and more than $28 billion total economic contributions to the United States in 2012.  The U.S. is the third-largest cotton producing country in the world, following India and China. The U.S. cotton producers have been able to stay competitive with countries like India and China by adopting the latest technologies. Despite the success of technology adoption, there are still many challenges, e.g., increase pest resistance, mainly glyphosate resistance weeds, and early indications of bollworm resistance to Bt cotton (genetically modified cotton that contains genes for an insecticide) to name a few. The autonomous mobile platform used a Robot Operating System (ROS) version kinetic and runs in Ubuntu 16.04. A new weeder design based on the cultivator setup will be presented. The weeder module has the capability to easily change the cultivating equipment, e.g., harrow disk, finger tine, or the combination of both. The harvester design was based on a stripper mechanism and used a suction motor to move the harvested cotton bolls to the container. Preliminary results for the field test on the weeder will be presented, and the new harvester design will be presented.