Design and operation of a Peucedani Radix weeding device based on YOLOV5 and a parallel manipulator

Xuechen Zhang; Chengmao Cao; Kun Luo; Zhengmin Wu; Kuan Qin; Minhui An; Wuyang Ding; Wang Xiang

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1171737

Design and operation of a Peucedani Radix weeding device based on YOLOV5 and a parallel manipulator

Front Plant Sci. 2023 May 30:14:1171737. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1171737. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Xuechen Zhang¹, Chengmao Cao¹, Kun Luo¹, Zhengmin Wu^{2

3}, Kuan Qin¹, Minhui An¹, Wuyang Ding¹, Wang Xiang¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Engineering, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China.
² School of Tea and Food Science and Technology, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China.
³ State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization, Hefei, China.

Abstract

To avoid excessive use of herbicides in the weeding operations of Peucedani Radix, a common Chinese herb, a precision seedling avoidance and weeding agricultural robot was designed for the targeted spraying of herbicides. The robot uses YOLOV5 combined with ExG feature segmentation to detect Peucedani Radix and weeds and obtain their corresponding morphological centers. Optimal seedling avoidance and precise herbicide spraying trajectories are generated using a PSO-Bezier algorithm based on the morphological characteristics of Peucedani Radix. Seedling avoidance trajectories and spraying operations are executed using a parallel manipulator with spraying devices. The validation experiments showed that the precision and recall of Peucedani Radix detection were 98.7% and 88.2%, respectively, and the weed segmentation rate could reach 95% when the minimum connected domain was 50. In the actual Peucedani Radix field spraying operation, the success rate of field precision seedling avoidance herbicide spraying was 80.5%, the collision rate between the end actuator of the parallel manipulator and Peucedani Radix was 4%, and the average running time of the parallel manipulator for precision herbicide spraying on a single weed was 2 s. This study can enrich the theoretical basis of targeted weed control and provide reference for similar studies.

Keywords: Peucedani Radix; YOLOv5; parallel manipulator; precision weeding; trajectory planning.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 52105239]; the Fund Agricultural competitiveness of Anhui Province to enhance science and technology action projects, China (AHSJXY202034060014).