Design and Implementation of a Smart Agricultural Robot bullDOG (SARDOG)

Over the past few decades, agricultural systems have encountered significant global challenges, including short-age of food supply, declining water availability, rising input costs, and diminishing agricultural labor. The advancement of Agricultural Technology (AgTech) in recent years has increased farm productivity and replaced manual monotonous tasks that are unsafe or inefficient for farm labor workers to do by hand. In this paper, we propose to develop and implement a smart agricultural robot named SARDOG that is based on the Farm-ng Amiga robot framework. SARDOG makes use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI), LiDAR, Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors, and a robotic arm all of which work hand in hand to perform multiple intelligent farming tasks autonomously and effectively. SARDOG is capable of autonomous GPS-less navigation using LiDAR, picking fruits using the robotic arm, testing the soil properties using a robotic actuator sensor framework, it can follow the farmers in the field and carry the produce for them among many other applications. The purpose of SARDOG is to make multiple major farming processes more efficient, cost-effective, and humane, as well as to perform some new farming processes that are not widely explored.