International Research Journal of Power and Energy Engineering

IRJPEE
Vol. 3(2), pp. 056-060, November, 2017. www.premierpublishers.org, ISSN: 3254-1213x

Conference Paper

Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot

*Arjun Prakash R1, Bharathi G B2, Manasa V3 and Gayathri S4
1,2,3,4
Department of ECE, SIT, Bangalore, India

Many farmers are facing lot of problems in agricultural occupation, every year farmers are
experiencing huge losses due to plant disease. Disease on plants reduces the quality as well as
the quantity of the crops. It is difficult to monitor the plant disease manually, even though farmers
have prior knowledge on the plant disease, it requires tremendous amount of work and excessive
processing time. In this paper we will provide the brief idea to solve the former problem by
developing Agricultural Robot, which will continuously monitor the farm under the guidance of
the operator and we will make use of image processing technique to find the disease on plant
leaf. And if disease is found user can make the robot to spray proper amount of pesticide to the
disease affected region or to the whole plant. This system resulted in detection of plant disease
and spray pesticides in proper amount.

Key Words: Agricultural Robot, Image Processing Algorithm, Robot movement, spraying mechanism.

INTRODUCTION

In this 21st century, the farmers are increasingly under
pressure to feed more people as the world population is
increasing. Agriculture is the main source of income to the
country. The youths are turning away from the agricultural
profession; thus, availability of human resource is
becoming less. The robot technique can make the farming
occupation an exciting Hi-Tech profession. And this may
attract the people into agricultural profession and also bring
back the people who left this profession. The agricultural
robot can perform basic elementary function like picking the
fruits/ vegetables, harvesting, weeding, pruning, seeding,
grafting, spraying etc. But in this paper, we concentrated
only on disease detection and spraying mechanism. In
early days monitoring and analysis of plant disease is done
manually by expertise persons, which require tremendous
amount of work and also excessive processing time. Here
we use the MATLAB software to carry out the image
processing technique, and this technique will increase the
accuracy of the work and also consumes less time. we are
using USB webcam mounted on agricultural robot to get
the streaming video on to the connected PC from which the
images are captures and are processed using MATLAB
software to detect disease. The robot is wirelessly
connected to the operators PC and smart phone for two
reasons (a) to receive the instructions regarding the
mission and (b) to stream live video on to the operators
PC. The servo motor, submersible pump, sprayer nozzle
and floating sensor is used for spraying mechanism.
LITERATURE SURVEY
In this section, various method of image processing for
plant disease detection is discussed.
The vegetation indices from hyper spectral data have been
shown for indirect monitoring of plant diseases. But they
cannot distinguish different diseases on crop. Wenjiang
Huang et al developed the new spectral indices for
identifying the winter wheat disease. In this paper three
different pests are considered (Powdery mildew, Yellow
rust and Aphids) for their study. To find the disease
wavelengths were extracted using RELIEF-F algorithm (K.
Thangadurai and K. Padmavathi, 2014). Enhanced images
have got more quality and clarity than original image using
RELIEF-F algorithm. Since primary images will be in RGB
form its difficult to process the RGB image because of its
range 0 to 255, hence this primary RGB is converted to
grey images. To enhance the image intensities are
distributed using histogram equalization.
*Corresponding author: Arjun Prakash. R, Department of
ECE, SIT, Bangalore, India. Email: arjunrp88@gmail.com

Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot

Arjun et al. 057

To extract the features of an image segmentation is most Bluetooth Module

important thing in image processing. Mrunalini. R. et al
Motor 1
uses K-means clustering and Otsu threshold algorithm for
the segmentation of the image (Mrunalini R et al., 2012). In
Motor Driver shield
this paper it is concluded that the clarity of the k-means
clustering is more and the extracted values of features are
Motor 2
less for K-means clustering.

To determine the health status of chilli plants, chilli plant Power supply
Arduino Floating sensor 1
leaf image is captured using digital camera. Zulkifli Bin
Submersible pump 1
Husin et al, 2014, uses digital camera to capture the leaf
Tank 1
image and MATLAB software to process the image. GUI for
the MATLAB is build using LABVIEW software. And this
Floating sensor 2
technique ensures that the chemical should be applied to
the diseased plants only. Submersible pump 2

Tank 2
To detect the disease in plant Al-Bashish et al., 2011, uses
Floating sensor 3
image processing. Artificial neural network is used for the
detection of disease in plants. This paper suggests to Submersible pump 3

create to different data bases, one for storing the disease Tank 3
images and other for implementation of query images. In Fig.1. Robot movement and spraying mechanism
this paper mainly 3 feature vectors are considered i.e.,
color, texture and morphology. And it is concluded with USB Webcam
morphological features give better result than other two
features.
Wirelessly connected
to operator PC
Shantanu Phadikar and Jaya Sil uses pattern recognition Power supply Raspberry pi
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- - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - -

techniques for the identification of rice disease in (H. Al-

Hiary et al., 2011). This paper describes a software
prototype for rice disease detection based on infected
image of rice plant. In this paper HIS model is used for
segmentation of the image after getting the interested
region, then the boundary and spot detection is done
identify infected part of the leaf.
PROPOSED SYSTEM
This agricultural robot reduces the overall efforts of farmers
and in addition it increases the speed and accuracy of the
work. This robot was developed to increase the accuracy
in application and to enhance the yield. Raspberry pi and
Arduino UNO is used as a microcontroller unit.
Fig.2. Live video streaming
The microcontroller unit i.e., Arduino UNO is programmed
to control the Robot activities. HC-05 Bluetooth module is
connected to the Arduino UNO which in turn connected to
the operators smart phone through which operator makes
the robot to perform activities like Robot movement and
spraying mechanism. Disease detection is done on the
operator PC using MATLAB software.
AGRICULTURAL ROBOT
This agricultural robot can exhibit 3 mechanisms, namely
(a) Robot Movement, (b) Video streaming and (c) Pesticide
spraying mechanism.

Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot


Robot movement
RC agricultural Live video
streaming
Robot
Spraying mechanism
Fig.3. RC agricultural robot mechanism
Operator make use of Android application for the Robot
Movement and for the pesticide spraying mechanism. An
ordinary USB web cam is connected to the Raspberry pi
which is placed on the robot to stream the live video to the
operator connected PC. To detect and classify the disease
in plants, we use MATLAB software to run the disease
detection algorithm on PC.
a. Robot Movement
For the movement of the robot, DC motors are used which
are electronically controlled by Arduino UNO with the help
of L293D. Input signals are received by the HC-05
Bluetooth module and sends it to the controller which in turn
controller makes the motor to spin. By receiving the signal
DC motors are turned ON and OFF by enabling particular
pin on arduino. 300rpm DC motors are used to provide the
sufficient speed.
b. Video Streaming
With the help of USB webcam and Raspberry pi we stream
the video to the operator PC. Video streaming can be done
in many ways i.e., by installing gstreamer software on both
raspberry pi and operators PC or installing VLC player on
both transmitter side and at the receiver side. We prefer to
use VLC player for streaming the video with the https://
followed by IP address of raspberry pi seems easy and also
operator can take the snapshots from the streaming video
for the further disease detection process.
c. Pesticide Spraying Mechanism
Bluetooth module is connected to the digital pin of Arduino
UNO which receives the signal from the android app
installed on the operators smart phone. Floating sensor
and submersible pump is kept inside the pesticide tank.
One end of the small diameter pipe is connected to the
submersible pump and the other end is connected to the
sprayer nozzle. By running the MATLAB algorithm, if the
algorithm says plant is affected by some disease, operator
can make use of Android app to spray particular pesticide.
DISEASE DETECTION ALGORITHM
The first phase of algorithms deals with separation of the
healthy crops from affected one and second phase of
algorithms concentrates on finding the disease on plant
leaf. An efficient and speedy response algorithm was
developed using MATLAB software. The basic steps for
classification using image processing are shown below,
Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot
Int. Res. J. Power Energy Engin. 058
Image Acquisition
Image Pre-processing
Image segmentation
Feature extraction
Disease Detection and
Classification
Fig.4. Basic steps for plant disease detection and
classification
Image Acquisition: The first stage of any vision system is
the image acquisition stage. After the image has been
obtained, various methods of processing can be applied to
the image to perform the many different vision tasks
required today. However, if the image has not been
acquired satisfactorily then the intended tasks may not be
achievable, even with the aid of some form of image
enhancement. The captured image will be in the form of
RGB (red, green and blue). Sometimes we have to convert
image from one form to another. MATLAB contains all the
tools require for image processing which covers all color
space transformations. Below figure shows loading the
image to the MATLAB software.
Image pre-processing: Different pre-processing
techniques are considered to eliminate the noise like
cropping, image smoothing and enhancement is carried out
to increase the contrast. Enhancement is a process of
enhancing the visual quality of images due to non-ideal
acquisition system. Some of the enhancement techniques
are edge enhancement, noise filtering, sharpening. Here,
the image is processed so that the result is more suitable
than the original image for a specific application.
The input color of the image are primary colors i.e., red,
green and blue. It is not possible to implement the
applications using RGB because of their range 0 to 255. So
RGB images are converted to grey images using color
conversion equation as below,
F(x) = 0.2989*R + 0.5870*G + 0.114*B (1)
Cumulative distribution is used to distribute intensity values
to enhance the plant disease image.
Image segmentation: Image segmentation is related to
partitioning of an image into its constituent parts.
Segmentation divides the image into meaningful parts or
regions. Meaning part may be complete object or a part of
it. Segmentation algorithms use image features to extract
regions. Edge detection, thresholding, boundary extraction,
Arjun et al. 059

region growing, splitting and merging are generally used for b. Enhance Contrast:-
segmentation. Here the leaf image is divided into number
of segments, not all the segments consist useful quantity of
information. Hence the patches that contain more than 50%
of useful information is taken for further analysis.
Feature extraction: Feature extraction a type of
dimensionality reduction that efficiently represents
interesting parts of an image as a compact feature vector.
After selecting the segmented part, various features like
color, texture, entropy, mean deviation and etc., are
extracted to describe the infected region.
Detection and classification of disease: After the feature Fig.6. Enhancing the image by increasing the contrast.
extraction is done, the obtained values are compared with
the pre-loaded values of healthy leaves. Based on c. Segment Image:-
difference in the values obtained by comparison,
classification of disease is done.

RESULTS

Fig.7. Segmenting the image with the ROI.

d. Classification Result:-

Fig.4. Working Model of the project

The concepts discussed in this paper were successfully

implemented and developed into a working model. Fig.4.
shows the final working model of the project. The images Fig.8. Classification of Result.
taken from the streaming video is loaded into the MATLAB
algorithm for the disease detection process. Results of e. Accuracy in percentage:-
image processing using MATLAB is shown below.
a. Load Image:-

Fig.9. Accuracy in percent.

Fig.5. Loading the image to the MATLAB algorithm.

Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot


Table I: SPRAYING RESULT TABLE
Pesticides that should
Input image sample
be sprayed
Dithane M 45 @ 20g in 10 liter
of waterin combin atio n with
plantamycin 3g to besprayed such
that all the leaves are covered.
Alternaria Alternata
Anthracnose
Bacterial Blight
Spraying Carbendazim @ 3g in 10
liter of water at 15 days interval,
commencing from 30 days after
planting.
Cercospora Leaf Spot
Spraying Pesticides is not required.
Healthy Leaf
CONCLUSION AND FUTURE SCOPE
For the successful cultivation on crops, plant disease
detection and classification are very important. This can be
done by using image processing and agricultural robot.
Using agricultural robot disease on the plants can be found
in the early stage or initial stage. Based on the result
obtained from the MATLAB algorithm decision should be
taken by the operator like which pesticide should to be
sprayed and how much quantity to be sprayed. Operator
can use the Android app installed in his smart phone to
control the robot movement and to spray the pesticide on
plants. Since raspberry pi will consume 70% of RAM to
stream the live video to the operator PC it will slow down
the whole process hence Arduino is used along with the
Raspberry pi, this will increase the working speed of the
robot. Floating sensors are provided to indicate the level of
pesticide inside the tank. In future work, this can be
extended to make the robot to move autonomously inside
the farm and can develop an algorithm to process the
image to find disease using raspberry pi, so that without the
operators help robot can move autonomously, find the
disease and will spray the proper amount of pesticide.
Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot
Int. Res. J. Power Energy Engin. 060
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors immensely thank Prof. Anupama.H.,
Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sambhram
institute of technology, Bengaluru for her full support in this
project.
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Accepted 23 October, 2017
Citation: Arjun PR, Bharathi GB, Manasa V and Gayathri
S (2017). Pesticide Spraying Agricultural Robot.
International Research Journal of Power and Energy
Engineering, 3(2): 056-060.
Copyright: 2017. Arjun et al. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted
use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and source are cited.