Intelligent low cost telecontrol system for agricultural vehicles in harmful environments

The use of vehicles to control pests and crop diseases is needed to maintain agricultural production. This paper describes how to design and implement a low cost intelligent telecontrol system applied for agricultural machinery that are designed for use in places where human presence is not adequate, such as pesticide spraying tasks in farming environments as greenhouses. The intelligent system designed basically consists of these parts: States Encoding, Console Automaton, Vehicle Automaton, Communication System and Security of Communications. This system has been developed with a special-purpose UHF narrow band modem that interchanges digital operative commands/states from the console to the vehicle. The intelligent telecontrol system acts as a security system to protect against outsiders, and loss of communications due to fading or others interference. The originality of this system is based on the fact that it is 10 times cheaper than autonomous systems; those systems need electronic systems, GPS, a complex sensorial system, and a beforehand mapping performed on the new work environment. Related to classic remote control, our system protects from potential oversights of the operator. In addition, in the proposed system, the vehicle state is shown in the console, due the bidirectional communications. The system was successfully applied in prototype vehicle used for spraying tasks, and the result shows that the system operated stably and has confirmed the effectiveness of this intelligent telecontrol system. The proposed technology will help providing solutions for humans and robots working together in agricultural environments considered to be harmful to humans. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.