Cable-driven agribot prototype: Enabling precision agriculture through innovative design

The ongoing depopulation of rural areas and the increasing demand for high-quality food, along with the need to improve the quality of work in terms of stress, injuries, and social disputes, needs significant attention towards rethinking and organizing agricultural practices to meet these needs and improve the quality of life. These changes call for the implementation of new reforms, incentive systems, and the exploration of innovative systems for field operations. In this context, the research, design, and commercialization of electrified autonomous and collaborative systems capable of precision agriculture applications, known as agribots, are gaining paramount importance. This article presents an innovative multi-robot for smart farming. The agribot is composed by a lightweight cart designed to traverse crop field rows through a cable-way system installed on two heavy carts equipped with a power train system and PV rooftop panels. The agribot is conceived to achieve a high level of autonomy, reduce energy consumption, and minimize soil compaction while working on flat fields with low-height crops. The article is structured in two parts: the first part describes the agribot's ICT network, the heavy carts electric grid and the power systems, providing an energy consumption analysis related to the traversing of a crop field row. The second part focuses on the control, actions coordination, and supervision system (supervisor), implemented using Robot Operating System (ROS). The supervisor system, driven by a decision-making system based on a finite state machine, oversees the execution of path planning for the agribot, providing high modularity and flexibility to adapt to various system actions.