Designing and Manufacturing of Automatic Robotic Lawn Mower

This study is about the manufacturing of a personified automatic robotic lawn mower with image recognition. The system structure is that the platform above the crawler tracks is combined with the lawn mower, steering motor, slide rail, and webcam to achieve the purpose of personification. Crawler tracks with a strong grip and good ability to adapt to terrain are selected as a moving vehicle to simulate human feet. In addition, a lawn mower mechanism is designed to simulate the left and right swing of human mowing to promote efficiency and innovation, and then human eyes are replaced by Webcam to identify obstacles. A human-machine interface is added so that through the mobile phone remote operation, users can choose a slow mode, inching mode, and obstacle avoidance mode on the human-machine interface. When the length of both sides of the rectangular area is input to the program, the automatic robotic lawn mower will complete the instruction according to the specified path. The chip of a Digital Signal Processor (DSP) TMS320F2808 is used as the core controller, and Raspberry Pi is used as image recognition and human-machine interface design. This robot can reduce labor costs and improve the efficiency of mowing by remote control. In addition to the use as an automatic mower on farms, this study concept can also be used in the lawn maintenance of golf courses and school playgrounds.

Download Full-text

Improving Human Ground Control Performance in Unmanned Aerial Systems

Future Internet ◽

10.3390/fi13080188 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 13 (8) ◽

pp. 188

Author(s):

Marianna Di Gregorio ◽

Marco Romano ◽

Monica Sebillo ◽

Giuliana Vitiello ◽

Angela Vozella

Keyword(s):

Situation Awareness ◽

Interface Design ◽

Human Machine Interface ◽

Ground Control ◽

Entire Group ◽

Unmanned Aerial Systems ◽

Ground Control Station ◽

Machine Interface ◽

Team Situation Awareness ◽

Aerial Systems

The use of Unmanned Aerial Systems, commonly called drones, is growing enormously today. Applications that can benefit from the use of fleets of drones and a related human–machine interface are emerging to ensure better performance and reliability. In particular, a fleet of drones can become a valuable tool for monitoring a wide area and transmitting relevant information to the ground control station. We present a human–machine interface for a Ground Control Station used to remotely operate a fleet of drones, in a collaborative setting, by a team of multiple operators. In such a collaborative setting, a major interface design challenge has been to maximize the Team Situation Awareness, shifting the focus from the individual operator to the entire group decision-makers. We were especially interested in testing the hypothesis that shared displays may improve the team situation awareness and hence the overall performance. The experimental study we present shows that there is no difference in performance between shared and non-shared displays. However, in trials when unexpected events occurred, teams using shared displays-maintained good performance whereas in teams using non-shared displays performance reduced. In particular, in case of unexpected situations, operators are able to safely bring more drones home, maintaining a higher level of team situational awareness.

Download Full-text