Design and Implementation of a Modular AI-enabled Shovel Weeder

This paper presents a smart weeder that can be attached to the rear of an agricultural vehicle and perform weed identification and weed removal in real-time. The weed detector is installed on the side of the weeder. The morphology-based image processing technology and YoLov3-based object detection method are used to identify specific and non-specific weeds, respectively. The weeding mechanism, including a DC motor, weeding handle, chain and gear are utilized to dig out the roots of weeds. The design idea of weeding tools originates from gardening knives, which have been improved and combined with rotating mechanisms to form a weeding machine. The weed identification method has been implemented on an embedded device with high-speed graphic processing unit. The experimental results show that the weeder can operate continuously for 31 times per minute. The weed detector can accurately detect the location of weeds even when the speed of mobile platform reduce up to 90 cm/sec.