Charging System Design of a Solar Powered Mobile Manipulator

The implementation of robots in the agriculture industry can improve farmers' life quality and ease their work burden. The solar-powered mobile manipulator is a promising application of digital farming. This paper designs a charging system installed on a mobile manipulator. This charging system is to overcome the drawback of solar energy dependence on irradiance. The robot can be directly powered by the sun during sunny days using the photovoltaic effect; however, if the weather suddenly turns cloudy and irradiance received by solar panels is reduced dramatically, the robot can be off suddenly. Hence, the application of an automatic charging system can be the answer to this problem. This paper proposes an automatic charging method while the robot is working on the farm, removing the need for farmers to remove the battery for charging. Farmers will undoubtedly benefit from this method in terms of time and labor. The charging system experiment was conducted for 10 days, where the highest efficiency is 17%, and the lowest is 10%. Even so, the solar-powered robot is still promising to be implemented as an agriculture robot.