Research Projects

Natural rubber is an important industrial raw material. Extraction of natural rubber from rubber trees of the prescribed quality requires intensive labor-oriented work. India is the third largest rubber producer in the Asia continent. The major steps involved in this process are rubber tree tapping, latex collection, and preservation. For getting quality rubber, the tapping process has to be done in the early morning. After tapping is done the farmer needs to wait for a couple of hours to get latex from the tree collected by the cups. The collection of latex needs to be done at a very fast rate to overcome the pre-coagulation property of rubber. It makes the latex solid if it is not collected in five hours. The concentration of rubber is the most needed to preserve high quality in manufacturing industries. In this proposal, a robotic rubber latex collection system has been developed to assist farmers in the field. A four-wheel skid steering vehicle configuration with an encoder and motor drive arrangement has been selected as the mobile robot base. An RGB-D camera is placed at the front of the vehicle capturing the tree attached with aruco markers in the field. The autonomous mobile robot needs to move with high resistance to ensure stability. Hence as the initial phase, the navigation path is planned and trained for the vehicle. The robotic base is moved to the starting point and the vehicle follows a straight-line trajectory for the detection of the next tree. The information about aruco markers and collecting cups is obtained from Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based imaging algorithm and Otsu thresholding. From the obtained information the vehicle moves towards the tree position and instruction is given to the end effector for the collection of the latex bowl. A four-finger metallic gripper with a scraper arrangement is used for latex collection. The collected latex from the tree is transferred to the collecting tank attached at the side of the vehicle. The level-sensing sensor attached to the collecting tank gives information about the amount of latex collected from each tree. This information can be further used for plant growth management. Each tree produces a latex of a maximum of 50g and the collection tank is designed to hold the latex collected from 100 trees. A nodal point is selected and a high-capacity storage tank is placed at that point. An indicator attached to the collection tank gives a signal if the maximum level is reached. A trajectory path is planned to move the latex to unload the collection tank and bring the vehicle to the tree where the latex is collected recently. The same process continues until it reaches the last tree.