Development of Weeding Turtle Robot for Paddy Fields

With the growing demand for organic food, weeding robots are being developed as a new method of agriculture that does not rely on scientific pesticides. Currently, “crawler-type” and “sphere-type” robots are being developed, but issues remain regarding their mobility in paddy fields and damage to rice plants. This paper proposes weeding turtle robot that has an amphibious mobility method and can be miniaturized to solve the aforementioned problems. This study designed prototypes of weeding turtle robot, three types of fin part, and fabricated the weeding motion. In addition, as an experimental environment, a pseudo paddy field was set up with red soil and tap water tank and a turbidity senser installed. The effectiveness of the weeding operation of the robot and the fin parts was verified from the changes in the measured values of the turbidity sensor when the developed robot was operated in the pseudo paddy field.