Pulling-Out Weeding Device for Intra-Row Weeding Robots

Overcoming labor shortages is a major challenge in global agriculture. One approach to address this is to develop autonomous weeding robots that can remove weeds from crops without human intervention. Our group has been developing an autonomous weeding robot that can pull weeds with improved weeding speed. This study proposes a new weeding device for autonomous robots that can perform weeding operations quickly. The weeding device has tweezers that pinch and pull weeds onto a rotating cylinder. Although the proposed weeding device can pull weeds, the success rate is not high, and weeds are often torn. Moreover, challenges, such as pulling out the weeds incorrectly and getting weeds tangled in the tweezers, remain.