Design and Simulation of Crop Monitoring Robot for Green House

Incidence of disease in horticultural crops is one of the important problems affecting the production of fruits, vegetables and flowers. Regular monitoring of crops for early diagnosis and treatment with pesticides or removal of the affected crop is some of the solution to minimize the crop loss. Monitoring of the crops by human labour is costly, time consuming, error prone due to insufficient knowledge of the disease and highly repetitive at different stages of crop growth. These needs have motivated to design a line following mobile robot with vision sensors for navigation across the field for disease identification in a green house. The robot has been designed and simulated in an open source software known as Virtual Robot Experimental Platform (V-REP) with experimental field of 40 crops. Programming for navigation is done in Lua scripting tool which is embedded with the V-REP software. Capturing of images has been performed using camera. Processing of images for identification of disease and its representation in a Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been done using an algorithm in MATLAB R2011B which interacts with V-REP tool through socket communication. Texture based analysis has been done to identify the diseased crops among the healthy crops in the simulated field setup.