AgriCruiser: An Open Source Agriculture Robot for Over-the-row Navigation
🤖 AI Summary
High operational costs for weed management and the poor adaptability and high cost of existing agricultural robots hinder adoption by small-scale farms. To address this, we propose AgriCruiser—an open-source, reconfigurable over-the-row agricultural robot. It features a T-slot aluminum extrusion chassis enabling adjustable track width, high ground clearance, and compact turning radius, thereby enhancing field maneuverability and headland turning efficiency. Integrated electric drive and precision spraying systems ensure stable navigation across diverse terrains—from concrete to saturated soil. Field trials in flax fields demonstrated a 24–42× reduction in weed density per pass, with significantly lower crop damage compared to manual weeding. The total material cost is only $5,000–$6,000, offering low-cost deployment, reproducibility, modular scalability, and cross-crop adaptability. AgriCruiser thus provides a scalable, open-platform solution for intelligent field management and phenotypic monitoring in resource-constrained settings.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
We present the AgriCruiser, an open-source over-the-row agricultural robot developed for low-cost deployment and rapid adaptation across diverse crops and row layouts. The chassis provides an adjustable track width of 1.42 m to 1.57 m, along with a ground clearance of 0.94 m. The AgriCruiser achieves compact pivot turns with radii of 0.71 m to 0.79 m, enabling efficient headland maneuvers. The platform is designed for the integration of the other subsystems, and in this study, a precision spraying system was implemented to assess its effectiveness in weed management. In twelve flax plots, a single robotic spray pass reduced total weed populations (pigweed and Venice mallow) by 24- to 42-fold compared to manual weeding in four flax plots, while also causing less crop damage. Mobility experiments conducted on concrete, asphalt, gravel, grass, and both wet and dry soil confirmed reliable traversal consistent with torque sizing. The complete chassis can be constructed from commodity T-slot extrusion with minimal machining, resulting in a bill of materials costing approximately $5,000 - $6,000, which enables replication and customization. The mentioned results demonstrate that low-cost, reconfigurable over-the-row robots can achieve effective weed management with reduced crop damage and labor requirements, while providing a versatile foundation for phenotyping, sensing, and other agriculture applications. Design files and implementation details are released to accelerate research and adoption of modular agricultural robotics.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Developing an open-source agricultural robot for crop row navigation
Creating a low-cost modular platform for precision weed management
Enabling adaptable robotics for diverse farming applications
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Open-source robot for adjustable crop navigation
Precision spraying system reduces weeds significantly
Low-cost modular design from commodity materials
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