An approach to a laser weeding system for elimination of in-row weeds
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In-row weeds are one of the biggest problems that are faced in agriculture. This paper presents an innovative way to deal with in-row weeds. A prototype robot was designed and tested that can detect plants with an onboard camera and make a decision after finding the plant to destroy it using onboard lasers. All the decision making on the robot was done by an onboard open source development platform known as BeagleBone Black. The system consisted of a simple plug and play USB camera to detect the plants, an optical encoder, an onboard GPS receiver, and halogen lamps to maintain uniform illumination. The operating software was created using lower level language (C and C++) to meet the real-time constraints, along with OpenCV libraries.