Human‐robot collaborative site‐specific sprayer

Spraying pesticides is a key element of agriculture worldwide, since 30% to 35% of crop losses can be prevented when harmful insects and diseases are eliminated by applying pesticides. Site‐specific spraying can help reduce pesticide application; however, target detection is limited due to the complex agricultural environment. This paper presents a human‐robot collaborative sprayer designed for site‐specific targeted spraying. The robotic sprayer platform, the framework, and tools for the robotic sprayer to collaborate with a remote human operator for the target detection and spraying tasks are detailed. An experiment to evaluate the elements of the collaborative human‐robot framework working in sync was designed, implemented, and evaluated. The collaborative spraying system shows a 50% reduction of sprayed material. The experiment also proves the feasibility of human‐robot collaboration for the complex task of spraying specific targets considering both the True Positive (TP) and False Positive (FP) rates.