SIKO GmbH is currently supporting an agricultural research and development project with two rotary encoders from its range for mobile machines.
The project is currently in the last third of the planning stage, having achieved its second milestone: the robot can already operate largely autonomously in an orchard. Work is still being carried out on avoiding collisions and detecting the ground conditions, to avoid getting the wheels stuck in muddy ground, for example, or drifting off course into a ditch. Milestone number three will then be actually to pick up a box and transport it.
A development project of this sort always poses particular challenges, starting with coordination of the interests of various fruit farms, which often have very different harvesting processes, through problems with the infrastructure, such as a stable cell phone standard so that the robot can receive GPS data and communicate with the operator, to practical difficulties in day-to-day outdoor operation (weather conditions, snow, rain, sunshine, ground conditions).
Source: automation.com