In order to distribute agricultural robots to the fields, based on the review of Japanese trends, three preliminary tasks and implications for the development of agricultural robots in Korea are derived as followings. The first result is that farmers are small-scale, agricultural robot is necessary to standardize through the public-private partnerships and reduce the supply price through the utilization of existing technologies and components. Secondly, the car-based robots are GPS-based system, and it is necessary to construct a nation-wide regional base stations that can trensmit the GPS correction signals free of charge in real time. Third, additional research is needed to cope with the unexpected situation in the fields, such as obstacle avoidance technology, robot safety evaluation technology, and safety standard development. In addition, although agricultural robots are being developed in Korea, a step-by-step approach is necessary for solving the above-mentioned pre-requisites for field distribution. In the first stage, it is necessary to supply an autonomous straight guidance system that assists the worker. The second stage is the spread of cooperation system between human and robot. The third stage is a complete robot system, in which the robot works on its own. Therefore, the supply of agricultural robots needs to be approached sequentially.

The aims of this paper is to develop a modular agricultural robot and its autonomous driving algorithm that can be used in field farming. Actually, it is difficult to develop a controller for autonomous agricultural robot that transforming their dynamic characteristics by installation of machine modules. So we develop for the model based control algorithm of rotary machine connected to agricultural robot. Autonomous control algorithm of agricultural robot consists of the path control, velocity control, orientation control. To verify the developed algorithm, we used to analytical techniques that have the advantage of reducing development time and risks. The model is formulated based on the multibody dynamics methods for high accuracy. Their model parameters get from the design parameter and real constructed data. Then we developed the co-simulation that is combined between the multibody dynamics model and control model using the ADAMS and Matlab simulink programs. Using the developed model, we carried out various dynamics simulation in the several rotation speed of blades.

This paper designed modular agricultural robotic platform capable of a variety of agricultural tasks to address the problems caused by a decline in agricultural populations and an increase in average age. We propose a modular robotic platform that can perform many tasks required in field farming by replacing only work modules with common robotic platforms. This platform is capable of steering while driving on four wheels in an upland environment where farm work is performed, and an attitude control module is attached to each drive module to control the attitude of the platform. In addition, the width of the platform is designed to be variable in order to operate in various ridges according to the crop cultivation method. Finally, we evaluated five items: variable width, gradient, attitude control angle, step and road speed in order to carry out the farming industry while maintaining a stable posture.

In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm of the guidance line extraction for autonomous agricultural robot based on vision camera in paddy field. It is the important process for guidance line extraction which finds the central point or area of rice row. We are trying to use the central region data of crop that the direction of rice leaves have convergence to central area of rice row in order to improve accuracy of the guidance line. The guidance line is extracted from the intersection points of extended virtual lines using the modified robust regression. The extended virtual lines are represented as the extended line from each segmented straight line created on the edges of the rice plants in the image using the Hough transform. We also have verified an accuracy of the proposed algorithm by experiments in the real wet paddy.