HISTORY

Earlier, cultivation was major employment in every part of the world . Farmers used to
take a year to cultivate one to two crops and the yield obtained had rich nutrients,
proteins. So there was no any effect in human body. That time the farmers used to face a
draw back in there cultivation due to growth of weeds along with necessary plant. Hence
they adopted several methods to remove the weed. Some methods are given below.
1.1 PULLING METHOD
You can pull out weeds by hand, or slash them with a machete, sickle or billhook. You
can also use a hoe for weeding, but this disturbs the soil surface. Hand weeding is often
the job of women and children. Here are some advantages of hand weeding: Uprooting
weeds by hand disturbs the soil less than using most types of equipment. Try not to
disturb the soil too much if you use a hoe or other implements. Hand tools are cheap and
can be bought in most markets. Hand weeding has several disadvantages. It is hard work
and takes a long time. The weeds may regrow easily. The stalks may not be crushed well,
making it difficult to plant crops through the residue.
1.2 MOWING AND STABBING METHOD
Mowing and cutting can reduce seed production and restrict weed growth, especially in
annuals cut before they flower and set seed. Some plants can be killed by stabbing the
carbohydrate storage structure at the base of the plant. Depending on the species, this
structure may be a root corm, storage rhizome (tuber), or taproot. These organs are
generally located at the base of the stem and under the soil. Cutting off access to these
storage structures can help “starve” or greatly weaken some species.
1.3 GRIDLING METHOD
Girdling is often used to control trees or shrubs that have a single trunk. It involves
cutting away a strip of bark several centimetres wide all the way around the trunk. The
removed strip must be cut deep enough into the trunk to remove the vascular cambium, or
inner bark, the thin layer of living tissue that moves sugars and other carbohydrates
between areas of production (leaves), storage (roots), and growing points. This inner
cambium layer also produces all new wood and bark.

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 INTRODUCTION

Commercial robotic weeding machines utilize one of several means to kill weed including
mechanical, flame or herbicidal spray. Robotically controlled devices are used to
eliminate weeds in the seed line between the crop plants (intra-row) while weeds between
the seed lines (inter-row) are controlled with conventional cultivation techniques. All
systems use a camera-based machine vision system to detect plants. Due to proprietary
reasons, the specifics of how these machines computer algorithms work is not known, but
based on observation and a review of product literature; it is assumed they do not classify
plants as being either crop or weed, but rather selectively identify crop plants. Classifying
plants as either crop or weeds is difficult with system accuracies of around only 85%,
even under ideal conditions. There are many ways to identify crop plants in digital
images, but typically this is done by first analyzing a captured imaged and classifying
each pixel in the image as being either a plant or a non-plant part using some type of
green thresholding technique. Once the image has been “segmented”, adjacent pixels are
analyzed. Regions with high levels of contrast between plant and non-plant parts indicate
potential leaf edge boundaries and contour lines are traced around the borders of these
areas. These “objects” are then further analyzed based on size, location relative to each
other, position relative to the seed row, shape and colour. Objects that do not meet the
user defined criteria as being characteristic of a crop plant are removed from the
segmented image. Once crop plant objects have been located, commands are sent to a
microcontroller which controls the intra-row weeding device.

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 TECHNICAL DETAILS OF DEVICE
3.1 DESIGN OF DEVICE

Fig.1
Design of weed remover device is based on agricultural land. Considering a land where
crops are grown in rows with equal space between it. Normally the two rows are spaced
about 30cm to 35cm, where that space is made to run water and to distribute it to each
and every crop. This space is utilised to run device which helps to remove unnecessary
plant in agricultural field

The device is fabricated with 5 components;

1. Metallic pad with wheels and motor embedded.

2. Camera with sensors to differentiate between two crops
3. Battery to run device
4. Adreno kit to store and transform signals
5. Robotic arm to pluck the plant

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3.2 OVERALL VIEW OF DEVICE

Fig.2

The figure shows the top, front and side view of device. To run the device between two
rows the dimension of metallic pad should be 17cm to 20cm width, 27cm to 30cm length
and thickness about 3cm to 4cm so as to sustain the load of battery and arm. The arm
length should be around 30cm to 35cm at stretch and the square block adjusts itself in
vertical movement of link. The camera should be cylindrical with sensor fitted at top of
lens. It should have the capacity to rotate at an angle of 270deg. Now coming to the
battery it should have the capacity of 9 to 12 volt. For example, if you choose a 12v, 2Ah
(2000mAh) a 12V motor consuming 2A continuously for 1 hour. Alternatively, it can run
a 12V motor consuming 1A for 2 hours, or a 12V motor consuming 0.5A for 4 hours. The
continuous discharge rate of battery is important to uniform movement of arms.

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3.3 SPECIFICATION OF CAMERA

Fig.3
This device requires a camera which is placed at front, middle of device so that it can take
picture of every plant and send it to Adreno chip, where the images are analysed by it.
The picture should be taken with respect to all angles and categorise it based on leaf, fruit,
and some time based on stem. Brief specification of camera required to install in this
device is as follows;

Maximal resolution 5Mpx@2fps

Maximal framerate 30fps@0.3Mpx

Focus range 70mm to 130mm

Auto focus yes

Integrated lighting 2 LED diffuse white light

Height 13.5mm to 23.5 mm

Weight 160g

Operating temperature 0 deg C to 50 deg C

Environment protection water- tight

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3.4 SPECIFICATION OF ARM

Fig.4
This is called robotic arm which does mechanical function of picking and
placing. Here this arm is place behind the battery or Adreno chip at is well
fixed at centre so that it can move its arm at both sides of cultivated row
equally. The specification suitable for agricultural bases is described as
follows;

Torque 15Kgf/cm to 18Kgf/cm

Speed 59 rpm to 97 rpm

Overall length 30cm to 35cm

Base height 2cm to 2.5cm

Initial base angle set 45deg increments

Overall weight 0.5kg to 0.8 kg

Material used Stainless steel

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3.5 SPECICIFATION OF ADRENO CHIP

FIG.5
Manufacturer Qualcomm
Adreno 530 @ 624 MHz
Adreno 510
Adreno 500 Series
Adreno 506 @ 650 MHz
Adreno 505 @ 450 MHz
Pipelines unified
Core Speed * 624 MHz
Shared Memory yes
DirectX DirectX 11.1
technology 14 nm
Features OpenGL ES 3.1 AEP, Open CL 2.0, Direct3D 11.1 (FL 11_1)

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 WORKING OF DEVICE
To detect weeds from the original crop, there are three parameters to distinguish weed
from the crop, namely they are: size, shape and colour.
Image processing is a method for converting an image into digital form and performing
some operations on it to get an enhanced image or to extract some useful information
from it. There are different image processing applications in agriculture like fruit grading,
harvest control, seeding, fruit picking, remote sensing etc. The methods or techniques in
image processing such as image segmentation, shape analysis and morphology, texture
analysis, noise elimination and pattern recognition were applied for detecting weeds and
crops. Further the automatic detection and removal of weeds system consists three major
systems. They are namely:
4.1 Automation Detection Unit.
4.2 Control Processing unit.
4.3 Output unit

4.1 AUTOMATION DETECTION UNIT

The computing system is based on a single-board PC with a digital signal processor.
This board received images of the field scene from a digital camera from the field through
serial interface. Inputs from proximity detectors, encoders and outputs to motors attached
with plucker are made through a custom-built interface board. This signal board
communicated with the main microcontroller board via RS232 serial interface that
performs low-level control algorithms and managed the inputs and outputs. The main
controller board and custom-built interface board along with their power supply were
fixed within a metal enclosure attached to the implement. The classification of the weeds
and crops are done based on the visual texture. The use of visual texture computed from
gray scale and color images to identify plant species. We can use color co-occurrence
matrices in the hue saturation and intensity color space to obtain an overall classification
accuracy of the images. But computation time is an important factor and suggests using a
smaller set of texture features.

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4.2 CONTROL PROCESSING UNIT
Two popular techniques are commonly used in the guidance system: one is machine
vision system and another is global positioning system. Here machine vision system is
used for the guidance and global positioning system is used for the monitoring purpose.
The important requirements of row guidance system are:
• Capability to track rows with an accuracy of a few centimetres.
• Capability to control a row cultivator and an automatic agribot in real-time, which
means that both offset and forward of the row structure must be estimated at a sufficient
fast rate.
• Capability to work on sow crops which means that the time of appearance and the size
of the crops may vary in the agriculture field. This also means that weeds and crops have
about the same size in early cultivation (discrimination between crops and weed cannot
be made by size only).
• Capability to work when there is high weed pressure.
• Capability to work when plants are not able to found in the row. This is mostly the case
in [organic] fields where coming is about 71%, which is less than in conventional fields,
where the coming usually is about 91%.
One of the most widely used machine vision methods for recognizing crop rows is
based upon the Hough transform. The Hough transform is a computationally efficient
steps for detecting discontinuous lines or curves in images, thus it is suited for situations
like those listed by A° strand where the crop stand is incomplete with intervals in the
crop rows due to bad germination, insect harm or other factors results in missing crop
plants in the row. To make possible row identification for agricultural guidance for
automatic guidance of a harvester. In one of the early implementations, the Hough
transform for row tracking in real-time and well known that their technique was tolerant
to weeds situated away. A camera was mounted in the middle on the system looking
forward and downwards such that the bottom of the agriculture field of view was
vertically beneath the camera and the area of the bed was distinctly able to seen. The
position of the plants across crop rows and their phase relative to the motor was identified
using computer vision. Camera superimposed with graphical guidance information.

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4.3 OUTPUT UNIT (WEED REMOVING)
Weed removal system prefers the mechanical weed removing techniques. These are
achieved by the use of mechanical knives, plucker and other desired mechanical
equipment used for weeding in the agriculture field. The PIC16F877A controller will be
fed with the input. The controller will be connected with a stepper motor. If there is no
weeds are present in the input image, the motor will stay idle and no further action takes
place. Else, the weeds are detected in the captured image the motor will start running;
which in turn induce the mechanical hoe/plucker system. Proteus ISIS and Micro C
software are used for simulating the mechanical hoe/plucker system which is connected
with the robot’s end effectors. The stepper motor is used to actuate the mechanical
hoe/plucker system which is highly important in the process of removing the weeds.

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 CONCLUSION
This paper permits the idea about the automatic detection and removal of weeds in the
agriculture field. Especially the removal of weeds mechanically. So the usage of
herbicides in the agriculture field is avoidable. With this paper it is concluded that in
agriculture field the crops and weeds are differentiated with image samples. The obtained
results are then analyzed, from these results weeds are identified after it is analyzed the
mechanical hoe which is controlled by the microcontroller is signalled. Microcontroller
gave the signal to motor to actuate the mechanical hoe system. The software simulation of
the system is done by using MATLAB, VSPE and PROTEUS.

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