Automatic agricultural robot using 8051

[devansh1103]

I want to build a automatic agricultural robot for my final year diploma project. The basic idea is to program 8051 to drive the robot in a fixed path in farm for ploughing the farm which i am planning to do by setting a particular distance till which it will go straight and then take a U turn and plough in next lane. Width of the farm will also be set so when it completes full farm it'll stop and go back to starting point. the only catch is to reprogram it as per size of the farm of the person who uses it. So i want to add a number pad with which he can set the length and width of the farm as well as width of each lane as per his needs without professional help. Can this be done using 8051 or should i go for AVR or PIC microcontrollers. I have just started studying programming and interfacing of 8051 so I am not that good in programming. If its possible how do i do it. can someone please help me with circuit diagram for this project. After everything i said i need in my project if i still get an empty port in microcontroller I would love to add a fertilizer sprayer or water irrigation system and a GSM module so that a farmer can simply ask the robot to start working using his mobile phone. As I am making just a prototype i want it to be as small as possible. Suggestions are welcomed.

 

[cowboybob]

Welcome to ETO, devansh1103!

I think you'd be better off using a PIC or equivalent and at that, something like an Arduino. A pre-built uC platform would vastly simplify the digital hardware aspect of your quest.

You've chosen something of a daunting task for yourself.

That said though, have you considered the positional accuracy needed for the plowing device (tractor) to hold a straight line? That alone will vastly increase the complexity of the system, i.e., do you use a laser sighting device, or a GPS monitoring method or what? A simple "distance traveled" and "total area needed to be plowed" is simple enough to determine, but rather more difficult to control a machine to traverse the field.

A similar problem would be that part of a system to accurately detect distance traveled and the alignment of the return plowing run with the previous row.

If I might suggest, could you provide a block diagram or a flow chart of your anticipated control needs for your system to achieve the end result(s)?

 

[atferrari]

Hola Devan,

A friend of mine works precisely in that area. He has even developed some circuitry for guidance / positioning. IIRC, he mentioned, besides the "normal" GPS usage, the implementation of kind of local "beacons" around the area of interest.

Why not to explore that part first?