阅读说明：本技术 一种基于履带式机器人的棉花打顶方法 (Cotton topping method based on crawler-type robot ) 是由 曾小英 杨广宇 朱琦 邱家麟 李上保 黄家文 向懿 邹娟 王求真 于 2019-12-27 设计创作，主要内容包括：本发明公开了一种基于履带式机器人的棉花打顶方法,该方法包括利用双目摄像头获取棉株上部枝叶分布情况,确定植株顶芽位置；匹配机械臂规划运动路径；控制机械臂移动,确保不触碰侧叶造成植株损伤,且距离需保证有效打顶；控制机械臂将爪部圆筒形旋转切刀伸至芽尖头部,切除顶芽完成棉花植株的打顶工作；控制机械臂收回并按照前述步骤继续打顶操作；控制履带式机器人前进至下一工作点,根据棉花株高实时控制升降杆调整双目摄像头高度,直至达到合理打顶操作位置；本发明有效解决了棉田人工打顶的工作效率低下,劳动强度大的问题,实现了以低成本高效率的机械方式进行打顶的目的。(The invention discloses a cotton topping method based on a crawler-type robot, which comprises the steps of acquiring the distribution condition of branches and leaves on the upper part of a cotton plant by using a binocular camera, and determining the position of a terminal bud of the plant; matching a mechanical arm planning motion path; the mechanical arm is controlled to move, so that the side leaves are not touched to cause plant damage, and the distance is required to ensure effective topping; controlling the mechanical arm to extend the claw cylindrical rotary cutter to the head of the bud tip, and cutting off terminal buds to finish the topping work of cotton plants; controlling the mechanical arm to withdraw and continuing topping operation according to the steps; controlling the crawler-type robot to advance to the next working point, and controlling the lifting rod to adjust the height of the binocular camera in real time according to the height of the cotton plant until a reasonable topping operation position is reached; the invention effectively solves the problems of low working efficiency and high labor intensity of manual topping of cotton fields, and achieves the purpose of topping in a mechanical mode with low cost and high efficiency.)

1. A cotton topping method based on a crawler robot is characterized in that the method is applied to the crawler robot for cotton topping, and the crawler robot comprises: the robot comprises a vehicle body, crawlers on two sides below a chassis of the vehicle body, a stepping motor for driving the robot to move at the rear part of each crawler, a four-degree-of-freedom mechanical arm at the front part of the vehicle body, a cylindrical cutter device at the front extending claw part of each mechanical arm, an automatic lifting rod in the middle of the vehicle body, a binocular camera at the top of the automatic lifting rod, a core control board and a motor drive board in the vehicle body, and a battery module at the tail part of the vehicle body, wherein the crawlers take the forward moving direction of the robot as the positive direction;

the method comprises the following steps:

acquiring the distribution condition of branches and leaves on the upper part of the cotton plant by using the binocular camera, and performing image processing to determine the position of terminal buds of the plant; the distribution condition of branches and leaves at the upper part of the plant comprises the stalk branching information of the cotton plant; the terminal bud position takes the initial position information of the tracked robot as reference;

acquiring three-dimensional coordinates of the terminal bud of the cotton plant, and planning a motion path of the mechanical arm by matching position information of the mechanical arm;

the mechanical arm is controlled to move to the position near the bud tip according to a set movement path, so that the side leaves are not touched to cause plant damage, and the distance is required to ensure effective topping; the position near the bud tip is the upper adjacent position of the bud tip;

controlling the mechanical arm to extend the claw cylindrical rotary cutter to the head of the bud tip, and cutting off terminal buds to finish the topping work of cotton plants;

controlling the mechanical arm to retract and continuing topping operation according to the steps; controlling the crawler-type robot to move forward to the next working point according to a fixed step number, and controlling the automatic lifting rod to adjust the height of the binocular camera in real time according to the height of the cotton plant until a reasonable topping operation position is reached; and the reasonable topping operation position is determined by the height of the top end of the plant and the height contrast difference value of the binocular camera.

2. The cotton topping method based on the crawler robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the mechanical arm comprises a base, a large arm, a small arm and a claw topping device which are sequentially connected to the vehicle body chassis, a large arm horizontal rotation steering engine arranged on the base of the vehicle body chassis, a large arm vertical rotation steering engine arranged in the large arm, and a front small arm vertical rotation steering engine arranged between the small arm and the claw topping device; the rear small arm vertical rotating steering engine is arranged between the front small arm vertical rotating steering engine and the large arm;

the large arm horizontal rotation steering engine is used for controlling the base to rotate in the horizontal direction, and the base drives the large arm to rotate in the horizontal direction; the large arm vertical rotation steering engine is used for controlling the large arm to rotate in the vertical direction by taking the connecting part of the large arm and the base as a center; the rear small arm vertical rotation steering engine is used for controlling the small arm to rotate in the vertical direction by taking the connecting part of the small arm and the large arm as the center; the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine arranged between the small arm and the claw part jacking device is used for controlling the claw part jacking device to rotate in a vertical direction by taking the small arm as a rotation center.

3. The cotton topping method based on the tracked robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the binocular camera is used for acquiring the distribution of branches and leaves on the upper part of a cotton plant, and image processing is performed to determine the position of a top bud of the plant, and specifically comprises:

acquiring a certain number of image sets, wherein the image sets comprise cotton plant overall images, and the cotton plant overall information is divided from a background by performing adaptive threshold segmentation pretreatment on the images;

selecting a proper edge operator by using the image set to discretize the outline of the cotton plant image, and solving the edge of the cotton plant image;

after the edge of the cotton plant image is obtained, storing discrete edge points in a stack space, substituting the discrete edge points into a Hough transform detection function, and detecting the edge straight line of the branches and leaves at the upper part of the cotton plant;

and setting two groups of return conditions in the edge straight line, namely deriving a group of straight line pairs with the closest slope and a straight line pair with two points with the densest projection in a parameter coordinate system and connecting the two points under the image matrix. Confirming that the screened straight line pair is the edge lines at two sides of the upper branches and leaves of the cotton plant, and realizing the extraction of the upper branch and leaf edges of the cotton plant image;

the top of the cotton plant and the main stem form a branch, the position of the top of the cotton plant required to be removed by topping is the position of the branch, and after the projection values are continuously positioned at the minimum horizontal axis position, the horizontal projection method is carried out by using continuous image rows;

the horizontal projection method processing specifically comprises the step of carrying out difference approximation operation from the lower end of an image to the upper end of the image in the projection process, and confirming that the position is the terminal bud position of the cotton plant if the movement deviation suddenly increases when the position reaches the position of the top fork of the cotton plant.

4. The cotton topping method based on crawler robot of claim 1,

the acquiring of the three-dimensional coordinates of the terminal bud of the cotton plant specifically comprises the following steps:

dividing the acquired cotton plant image into NxN grid images by using a POLO grid idea, taking 80% of the grid images as a training set and 20% of the grid images as a testing set, taking the grid images of the training set as input images to perform CNN training, and merging similar areas;

selecting VGG 16 with good migration capacity for training in the combination of the CNN framework and the subsequent grids, and setting the proportion of the top block to other blocks in each batch to be 1:9 by utilizing a batch gradient descent optimization function and considering the proportion of the top buds in the cotton plant image;

after the full-connected layer, adding a two-classification full-connected layer before the softmax layer, and reducing the dimension of 4096 to 2 dimensions, namely establishing a terminal bud fixed-point model;

after the terminal bud fixed point model is used for testing the test set image, a loss function and the accuracy of the test set are obtained and are used for further modifying the terminal bud positioning model; and after the multiple tests and modifications, importing the cotton plant acquisition image into the terminal bud fixed point model to obtain the three-dimensional coordinates of the terminal bud of the cotton plant.

5. The cotton topping method based on the crawler robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the control of the mechanical arm to move to the vicinity of the bud tip part according to a set movement path ensures that the side leaves are not touched to cause plant damage and the distance is required to ensure effective topping, and specifically comprises:

the large arm horizontal rotation steering engine, the large arm vertical rotation steering engine, the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine between the small arm and the claw top-lifting device, and the rear small arm vertical rotation steering engine between the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine and the large arm are controlled to cooperatively act, so that the mechanical arm is moved to the position near the cotton plant bud tip.

6. The cotton topping method based on the crawler robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the mechanical arm is controlled to extend a claw cylindrical rotary cutter to a bud tip head part, and top buds are cut off to finish the topping work of the cotton plant, and the method specifically comprises the following steps:

the claw cylindrical rotary cutter is extended to the head of a bud tip by the mechanical arm, the core control board sends an instruction to the motor driving board to control the motor inside the claw cylindrical barrel to rotate so as to drive the cutter connected to a motor spindle to rotate, the cutter is set to have a higher rotating speed which can be set to be a value above 700r/min and is used for cutting off the top bud part at the top of a cotton plant, the cutter blade consists of four long steel sheets which are uniformly distributed around a shaft and have a certain inclination angle with the horizontal plane, and the lower edge of the cutter blade is in a sawtooth shape;

the cylindrical rotary cutter is protected by a latticed shell outside the cutter blade, the diameter of the cylindrical rotary cutter is equal to that of the cylinder, only the top part of the central bud is cut off, and peripheral side leaves are isolated from being damaged; the mechanical arm is controlled to lift up to a certain height after the top buds are cut off by the cylindrical rotary cutter, the binocular camera collects images of the top bud positions to distinguish the effect of removing the top buds, and after the top buds are determined to be successfully removed, the core control board sends instructions to the motor drive board to control the motor in the claw cylinder to stop rotating.

7. The cotton topping method based on the crawler robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the controlling of the robot arm retraction specifically comprises:

and controlling the mechanical arm to horizontally rotate the steering engine, vertically rotate the front small arm between the small arm and the claw jacking device to rotate the steering engine in the vertical direction, and vertically rotate the rear small arm between the front small arm and the large arm to cooperatively move, so that the mechanical arm is retracted to the original position.

8. The cotton topping method based on crawler robot of claim 1, wherein controlling the crawler robot to advance to the next working point according to a fixed number of steps comprises:

acquiring a mechanical arm action recovery signal to the core control board, and sending a forward instruction to a motor drive board by the core control board, so that the motor drive board starts to work;

the motor driving plate controls the stepping motor at the rear part of the crawler to move forward for a distance of a vehicle body and stop when the stepping motor reaches a corresponding position;

the stopping when the corresponding position is reached specifically comprises the steps of obtaining the motion condition of the stepping motor at the rear part of the crawler and feeding the motion condition back to a core control board in the vehicle body, and disconnecting the voltage supply of the motor driving board after the stop point is reached.

9. The cotton topping method based on the crawler robot as claimed in claim 1, wherein the automatic lifting rod is controlled in real time according to the cotton plant height to adjust the height of the binocular camera until a reasonable topping operation position is reached, and specifically comprises:

acquiring cotton plant height image information acquired by the front side of the binocular camera, transmitting the acquired cotton plant height image information to the core control board for data comparison, and if the actual plant height exceeds a certain horizontal value, adjusting the height of the binocular camera, otherwise, continuing the above series of topping steps;

the length of the automatic lifting rod is controlled to be specifically installed on a vertical central axial rotation steering engine at the bottom of the lifting rod, the command of the core control panel for adjusting the height of the binocular camera is received, a lead screw nut inside the lifting rod is driven, and the rotary motion of the vertical central axial rotation steering engine is changed into linear motion, so that the length of the lifting rod is changed.

Technical Field

The invention relates to the technical field of agricultural production, in particular to a cotton topping method based on a crawler-type robot.

Background

Cotton is an important strategic material in China and is also an economic crop with a higher position in agricultural production. The cotton growth process needs to be limited in growth height, so that the cotton can be grown early to avoid production loss due to climate. The cotton plant growth height limiting means is cotton topping, namely, in the bud period of the cotton plant growth, the terminal bud of the cotton is removed by physical or chemical means, so that the auxin content at the top end of the main stem of the cotton plant is greatly reduced, the growth of the cotton plant is inhibited, more nutrients are supplied to the growth of reproductive organs such as buds and the like, and the effects of early boll forming and boll forming increase of the cotton plant are achieved. In the cotton planting and harvesting process, only topping is carried out, and mechanized operation is not realized, and manual topping is still required. However, the working environment of manual topping is severe, the topping efficiency is too low, the cotton planting scale is severely limited, and the positivity of cotton farmers is influenced. In order to improve the operation efficiency of cotton topping and reduce the topping cost, a mechanical mode with high efficiency and low cost can be adopted for topping.

Disclosure of Invention

The invention aims to provide a cotton plant topping method by using a crawler-type robot, so as to realize automatic cotton topping operation, improve the cotton topping operation efficiency and reduce the manual topping cost.

In order to achieve the above object, the present invention provides a cotton topping method based on a tracked robot, which is a method applied to a tracked robot for cotton topping, wherein the tracked robot comprises: the robot comprises a vehicle body, crawlers on two sides below a chassis of the vehicle body, a stepping motor for driving the robot to move at the rear part of each crawler, a four-degree-of-freedom mechanical arm at the front part of the vehicle body, a cylindrical cutter device at the front extending claw part of each mechanical arm, an automatic lifting rod in the middle of the vehicle body, a binocular camera at the top of the automatic lifting rod, a core control board and a motor drive board in the vehicle body, and a battery module at the tail part of the vehicle body, wherein the crawlers take the forward moving direction of the robot as the positive direction;

the method comprises the following steps:

acquiring the distribution condition of branches and leaves on the upper part of the cotton plant by using the binocular camera, and performing image processing to determine the position of terminal buds of the plant; the distribution condition of branches and leaves at the upper part of the plant comprises the stalk branching information of the cotton plant; the terminal bud position takes the initial position information of the tracked robot as reference;

acquiring three-dimensional coordinates of the terminal bud of the cotton plant, and planning a motion path of the mechanical arm by matching position information of the mechanical arm;

the mechanical arm is controlled to move to the position near the bud tip according to a set movement path, so that the side leaves are not touched to cause plant damage, and the distance is required to ensure effective topping; the position near the bud tip is the upper adjacent position of the bud tip;

controlling the mechanical arm to extend the claw cylindrical rotary cutter to the head of the bud tip, and cutting off terminal buds to finish the topping work of cotton plants;

controlling the mechanical arm to retract and continuing topping operation according to the steps; controlling the crawler-type robot to move forward to the next working point according to a fixed step number, and controlling the automatic lifting rod to adjust the height of the binocular camera in real time according to the height of the cotton plant until a reasonable topping operation position is reached; and the reasonable topping operation position is determined by the height of the top end of the plant and the height contrast difference value of the binocular camera.

Optionally, the mechanical arm comprises a base, a large arm, a small arm and a claw part topping device which are sequentially connected to the vehicle body chassis, a large arm horizontal rotation steering engine arranged on the base of the vehicle body chassis, a large arm vertical rotation steering engine arranged in the large arm, and a front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine arranged between the small arm and the claw part topping device; the rear small arm vertical rotating steering engine is arranged between the front small arm vertical rotating steering engine and the large arm;

the large arm horizontal rotation steering engine is used for controlling the base to rotate in the horizontal direction, and the base drives the large arm to rotate in the horizontal direction; the large arm vertical rotation steering engine is used for controlling the large arm to rotate in the vertical direction by taking the connecting part of the large arm and the base as a center; the rear small arm vertical rotation steering engine is used for controlling the small arm to rotate in the vertical direction by taking the connecting part of the small arm and the large arm as the center; the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine arranged between the small arm and the claw part jacking device is used for controlling the claw part jacking device to rotate in a vertical direction by taking the small arm as a rotation center.

Optionally, the binocular camera is used for acquiring the distribution of branches and leaves on the upper part of the cotton plant, and image processing is carried out to determine the terminal bud position of the plant, and the method specifically comprises the following steps:

acquiring a certain number of image sets, wherein the image sets comprise cotton plant overall images, and the cotton plant overall information is divided from a background by performing adaptive threshold segmentation pretreatment on the images;

selecting a proper edge operator by using the image set to discretize the outline of the cotton plant image, and solving the edge of the cotton plant image;

after the edge of the cotton plant image is obtained, storing discrete edge points in a stack space, substituting the discrete edge points into a Hough transform detection function, and detecting the edge straight line of the branches and leaves at the upper part of the cotton plant;

and setting two groups of return conditions in the edge straight line, namely deriving a group of straight line pairs with the closest slope and a straight line pair with two points with the densest projection in a parameter coordinate system and connecting the two points under the image matrix. Confirming that the screened straight line pair is the edge lines at two sides of the upper branches and leaves of the cotton plant, and realizing the extraction of the upper branch and leaf edges of the cotton plant image;

the top of the cotton plant and the main stem form a branch, the position of the top of the cotton plant required to be removed by topping is the position of the branch, and after the projection values are continuously positioned at the minimum horizontal axis position, the horizontal projection method is carried out by using continuous image rows;

the horizontal projection method processing specifically comprises the step of carrying out difference approximation operation from the lower end of an image to the upper end of the image in the projection process, and confirming that the position is the terminal bud position of the cotton plant if the movement deviation suddenly increases when the position reaches the position of the top fork of the cotton plant.

Optionally, the acquiring the three-dimensional coordinate of the terminal bud of the cotton plant specifically includes:

dividing the acquired cotton plant image into NxN grid images by using a POLO grid idea, taking 80% of the grid images as a training set and 20% of the grid images as a testing set, taking the grid images of the training set as input images to perform CNN training, and merging similar areas;

selecting VGG 16 with good migration capacity for training in the combination of the CNN framework and the subsequent grids, and setting the proportion of the top block to other blocks in each batch to be 1:9 by utilizing a batch gradient descent optimization function and considering the proportion of the top buds in the cotton plant image;

after the full-connected layer, adding a two-classification full-connected layer before the softmax layer, and reducing the dimension of 4096 to 2 dimensions, namely establishing a terminal bud fixed-point model;

after the terminal bud fixed point model is used for testing the test set image, a loss function and the accuracy of the test set are obtained and are used for further modifying the terminal bud positioning model; and after the multiple tests and modifications, importing the cotton plant acquisition image into the terminal bud fixed point model to obtain the three-dimensional coordinates of the terminal bud of the cotton plant.

Optionally, control the arm moves near bud tip position according to the motion route of setting for, ensures not touching the side leaf and causes the plant damage, and the distance needs to guarantee effectively topping, specifically includes:

the large arm horizontal rotation steering engine, the large arm vertical rotation steering engine, the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine between the small arm and the claw top-lifting device, and the rear small arm vertical rotation steering engine between the front small arm vertical direction rotation steering engine and the large arm are controlled to cooperatively act, so that the mechanical arm is moved to the position near the cotton plant bud tip.

Optionally, control the arm extends claw cylinder rotary cutter to bud top head, cuts the work of topping that the cotton plant was accomplished to the terminal bud, specifically includes:

the claw cylindrical rotary cutter is extended to the head of a bud tip by the mechanical arm, the core control board sends an instruction to the motor driving board to control the motor inside the claw cylindrical barrel to rotate so as to drive the cutter connected to a motor spindle to rotate, the cutter is set to have a higher rotating speed which can be set to be a value above 700r/min and is used for cutting off the top bud part at the top of a cotton plant, the cutter blade consists of four long steel sheets which are uniformly distributed around a shaft and have a certain inclination angle with the horizontal plane, and the lower edge of the cutter blade is in a sawtooth shape;

the cylindrical rotary cutter is protected by a latticed shell outside the cutter blade, the diameter of the cylindrical rotary cutter is equal to that of the cylinder, only the top part of the central bud is cut off, and peripheral side leaves are isolated from being damaged; the mechanical arm is controlled to lift up to a certain height after the top buds are cut off by the cylindrical rotary cutter, the binocular camera collects images of the top bud positions to distinguish the effect of removing the top buds, and after the top buds are determined to be successfully removed, the core control board sends instructions to the motor drive board to control the motor in the claw cylinder to stop rotating.

Optionally, the controlling the mechanical arm to retract specifically includes:

and controlling the mechanical arm to horizontally rotate the steering engine, vertically rotate the front small arm between the small arm and the claw jacking device to rotate the steering engine in the vertical direction, and vertically rotate the rear small arm between the front small arm and the large arm to cooperatively move, so that the mechanical arm is retracted to the original position.

Optionally, the controlling the tracked robot to advance to the next working point according to the fixed number of steps specifically includes:

acquiring a mechanical arm action recovery signal to the core control board, and sending a forward instruction to a motor drive board by the core control board, so that the motor drive board starts to work;

the motor driving plate controls the stepping motor at the rear part of the crawler to move forward for a distance of a vehicle body and stop when the stepping motor reaches a corresponding position;

the stopping when the corresponding position is reached specifically comprises the steps of obtaining the motion condition of the stepping motor at the rear part of the crawler and feeding the motion condition back to a core control board in the vehicle body, and disconnecting the voltage supply of the motor driving board after the stop point is reached.

Optionally, adjust according to the automatic lifter of cotton height real-time control binocular camera height, until reaching reasonable operation position of pinching, specifically include:

acquiring cotton plant height image information acquired by the front side of the binocular camera, transmitting the acquired cotton plant height image information to the core control board for data comparison, and if the actual plant height exceeds a certain horizontal value, adjusting the height of the binocular camera, otherwise, continuing the above series of topping steps;

the length of the automatic lifting rod is controlled to be specifically installed on a vertical central axial rotation steering engine at the bottom of the lifting rod, the command of the core control panel for adjusting the height of the binocular camera is received, a lead screw nut inside the lifting rod is driven, and the rotary motion of the vertical central axial rotation steering engine is changed into linear motion, so that the length of the lifting rod is changed.

According to the specific embodiment provided by the invention, the invention discloses the following technical effects:

the invention provides a cotton topping method based on a crawler robot, which effectively solves the problems of low working efficiency and high labor intensity of manual topping of cotton fields and achieves the purpose of topping in a mechanical mode with low cost and high efficiency.

Drawings

In order to more clearly illustrate the embodiments of the present invention or the technical solutions in the prior art, the drawings needed to be used in the embodiments will be briefly described below, and it is obvious that the drawings in the following description are only some embodiments of the present invention, and it is obvious for those skilled in the art to obtain other drawings without inventive exercise.

FIG. 1 is a schematic flow chart of a cotton topping method based on a crawler robot according to an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 2 is a schematic diagram of the basic structure of a tracked robot according to an embodiment of the invention;

FIG. 3 is a schematic diagram of a tracked robot topping a first cotton plant in accordance with an embodiment of the present invention;

FIG. 4 is a schematic diagram of the tracked robot of the embodiment of the invention moving to a position and then continuing to perform topping;

FIG. 5 is a schematic diagram of the cotton topping operation based on the crawler robot in practical application.

Detailed Description

The technical solutions in the embodiments of the present invention will be clearly and completely described below with reference to the drawings in the embodiments of the present invention, and it is obvious that the described embodiments are only a part of the embodiments of the present invention, and not all of the embodiments. All other embodiments, which can be derived by a person skilled in the art from the embodiments given herein without making any creative effort, shall fall within the protection scope of the present invention.

The invention aims to provide a cotton topping method based on a crawler robot so as to improve the working efficiency of cotton plant topping.

In order to make the aforementioned objects, features and advantages of the present invention comprehensible, embodiments accompanied with figures are described in further detail below.