Human-robot collaborative site-specific sprayer

Spraying pesticides is a key element of agriculture worldwide, since 30% to 35% of crop losses can be prevented when harmful insects and diseases are eliminated by applying pesticides. Site-specific spraying can help reduce pesticide application; however, target detection is limited due to the complex agricultural environment. This paper presents a human-robot collaborative sprayer designed for site-specific targeted spraying. The robotic sprayer platform, the framework, and tools for the robotic sprayer to collaborate with a remote human operator for the target detection and spraying tasks are detailed. An experiment to evaluate the elements of the collaborative human-robot framework working in sync was designed, implemented, and evaluated. The collaborative spraying system shows a 50% reduction of sprayed material. The experiment also proves the feasibility of human-robot collaboration for the complex task of spraying specific targets considering both the True Positive (TP) and False Positive (FP) rates.