Design and Development of Weed Uprooting Machine

Weed management is one of the tedious operations in vegetable production. Because of labor costs, time and tedium, manual weeding is unfavorable. However, the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds, environmental impact and increasing demand for chemical free foods has led to investigations of alternative methods of weed control. Most implements employing mechanical cultivation cannot perform weed control close to the crops, and existing intra-row weeders have limitations. A mechanical weeding actuation system was designed, and a prototype was constructed. This actuator was developed to mechanically control intra-row weed plants. Automated, non-chemical, intra-row weed control techniques for commercial crop production systems are an important and challenging task in industrialized countries. This study describes an intra-row mechanical weed knife path control system for transplanted row crops. These co-robots have a symbiotic relationship with a human partner, where, as a team, they combine their relative strengths to jointly perform a task. Such co-robots should be relatively inexpensive and easy to use. In this work, mechanical weed control was achieved by a co-robot actuator that automatically positioned a pair of miniature hoes into the intra-row zone between crop plants. Whatever the different problems faces such as lot of labor costs, chemical problem & food poisons hence, the mechanical weeding actuator consisted of a Mechanical linkage. One of the major challenges in this project was to properly design the actuator and its weeding mechanism for effective intra-row weeds.