Development of an Embedded Obstacle Avoidance and Path Planning Autonomous Solar Grass Cutting Robot for Semi-Structured Outdoor Environment

Grasses give beauty to the environment especially when properly managed. There are challenges of and not limited to time consuming, labour intensiveness in carrying out these maintenance thus, the need for the system which can autonomously perform such task. Many researches on autonomous grass cutting robot have been limited to obstacle avoidance and path planning but lawn availability is still a major area ofconcern. This study is aimed at developing an autonomous solar grass cutting robot embedded with obstacle avoidance and path planning mechanisms. The autonomous robot utilizes energy from the sun via photovoltaic panel to charge the battery for continuous performance of the robot. The obstacle avoidance and path planning for area covering of the robot were achieved using infrared sensor and 2D laser scanner respectively. The efficiency evaluation of the machine was based on the primary set objectives of obstacle avoidance and path planning in terms of area coverage, machine lawn availability, energy consumption and machine intervention. The results show that the machine operates at an efficiency of almost 100 % in in term of area coverage. Percentage machine intervention and lawn availability are 5 and 95 %, respectively. Also, 6000 Wh average energy consumption was achieved. The development is very suitable for a semi-structured environment.