For a plant, if it cannot access the necessary nutrients then will make the limit of the overall growth of the plant, which will greatly reduce the economic return to the farmer. Farmers use a range of strategies for increasing the availability of nutrients for a growing crop, most notably the addition of chemical fertilizers, for example, nitrogen and phosphorus.
Professor Liangxiu Han of Manchester Metropolitan University and her team work to establish the cutting edge "N2 Vision" Nitrogen mapping system which allows farmers to apply fertiliser just where it's needed to maximise yield while protecting the environment.
Together with Europe's agricultural automatic spray system providers Auto Spray Systems, and GMV Group, Liangxiu's team build an advanced soil composition detection and mapping robot using nitrogen and soil sampling technology that could revolutionise the way farmers work in the near future.
Richard Westcott, the BBC's Science Correspondent spent the day finding out more about how autonomous robots can help UK farmers reduce their carbon and nitrogen footprint by working smarter. Checked out the video of the BBC introducing the N2 robotics platform.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIOWOZ23Tjs
Combined with the robotic arm structure, the advanced soil sampling, analysis and mapping system of the N2 robot is mounted on the AgileX Robotics Scout Mini, an all-terrain and lightweight mobile chassis platform. The team changes the motion model of Scout Mini into the Omni-directional driven mode, which makes it more lightweight, flexible, and energy-effective to meet the needs of agriculture field applications.
The N2 Robot can drive flexibly on the farm autonomously, navigate between the planted rows on the uneven terrain of an agricultural field. Then, it implants the arm detection syetem into the soil for sampling detection and mapping, and precise positioning and judging the status of soil nutrient type and content.
With the "N2 Vision" Nitrogen mapping robot, the farmers are improving efficiency and increasing margins while reducing chemical use, lowering carbon emissions and improving worker safety. The robust N2 robotic platform allows fields to be quickly scanned no matter what the weather.
AgileX Robotics UGV Scout Mini is the better choice for an all-around, lightweight mobile research platform designed for cutting-edge scientific research. The SCOUT MINI supports access to the multi-level autonomous operating systems through the CAN bus protocol, it can mount more sensors system like monitoring and inspection system to extend research and development in more AI agricultural applications, such as the monitoring of soil temperature, moisture, root depth and health, and pest monitoring.
About Liangxiu Han robotics team of Manchester Metropolitan University
Liangxiu Han is a full Professor at School of Computing, Mathematics and Digital Technology, Manchester Metropolitan University. Prof. Han is Co-Director of Cenre for Advanced Computational Science and MMU Crime and Well-Being Big Data Centre.
About AgileX Robotics
AgileX Robotics is committed to helping company enterprises, researchers, education to quickly deploy and develop the cutting-edge smart robotics research platform to improve productivity in all industries. AgileX Robotics has a full line of UGV chassis that can tackle all terrain environments like an indoor factory, city road, mud road, off-road, rivers, drainage channel, as well as easy to develop an autonomous system like auto-navigation, mapping systems upon the vehicle body. Moreover, AgileX chassis also provides a Gazebo model while supporting ROS packages for industry researchers and education to develop and verify in the physical world.
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