A techie-turned-farmer Manohar Sambandam has made India’s first agri-tech robot to battle farm labour shortage - cotton-picking robot.
When you pick cotton, you have to use your hand — and the shells create a sharp edge, and you can hurt your hand.
There is a shortage of labour because people were not willing to pick it.
The robot uses a six degrees of freedom arm, so that it can approach the cotton boll from the side. It uses path planning algorithms and inverse kinematics to guide the arm, and avoid the branches.
The robot is able to detect cotton through image processing, without the need for deep learning algorithms.
The arm is fitted with a tube that has vacuum maintained in it that sucks out the cotton boll and collects it in one go.
These arms are mounted in a machine which is supposed to move over a row of plants. The robot is semi-autonomous, or human operated, as moving it through rows of cotton has to be done manually.
The team is aiming for an efficiency of between 250 kg and 500 kg per day — about 5 to 10 times efficiency compared to manual labor.
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