PLoS ONE (Jan 2024)

Designing and development of agricultural rovers for vegetable harvesting and soil analysis.

  • Bristy Das,
  • Tahmid Zarif Ul Hoq Sayor,
  • Rubyat Jahan Nijhum,
  • Mehnaz Tabassum Tishun,
  • Taiyeb Hasan Sakib,
  • Md Ehsanul Karim,
  • Afm Jamal Uddin,
  • Aparna Islam,
  • Abu S M Mohsin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0304657
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 19, no. 6
p. e0304657

Abstract

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To address the growing demand for sustainable agriculture practices, new technologies to boost crop productivity and soil health must be developed. In this research, we propose designing and building an agricultural rover capable of autonomous vegetable harvesting and soil analysis utilizing cutting-edge deep learning algorithms (YOLOv5). The precision and recall score of the model was 0.8518% and 0.7624% respectively. The rover uses robotics, computer vision, and soil sensing technology to perform accurate and efficient agricultural tasks. We go over the rover's hardware and software, as well as the soil analysis system and the tomato ripeness detection system using deep learning models. Field experiments indicate that this agricultural rover is effective and promising for improving crop management and soil monitoring in modern agriculture, hence achieving the UN's SDG 2 Zero Hunger goals.