Executive Summary : | Natural rubber extraction from rubber trees is a crucial industrial raw material, with India being the third largest producer in Asia. The process involves tapping the tree, collecting latex, and preserving the latex. The concentration of rubber is crucial for manufacturing industries. A robotic rubber latex collection system has been developed to assist farmers in the field. The system uses a four-wheel skid steering vehicle with an encoder and motor drive arrangement, an RGB-D camera, and a Convolution Neural Network (CNN)-based imaging algorithm and Otsu thresholding to detect the next tree. The vehicle moves towards the tree position and instructs the end effector for latex collection. The collected latex is transferred to a collecting tank, which has a level-sensing sensor that provides information about the amount of latex collected from each tree. The tank holds latex collected from 100 trees, and a nodal point is selected for storage. An indicator signals when the maximum level is reached. A trajectory path is planned to move the latex to unload the tank and bring the vehicle to the tree where the latex was collected recently. |