Design and Implementation of Bio-inspired Snake Bone-armed Robot for Agricultural Irrigation Application

This paper proposes a bionic electric spraying rod to perform the crop watering and spraying in the farm. The design concept of multiple vertebrae structures of snake is used to realize a reproducible snake bone arm and muscles of snake, which can be regarded as multiple sets of thin wires and be pulled and released through driver module. It results in different attitudes of the snake bone arm. A water pipe is installed in the snake arm connected to the spray nozzle for spraying. The mobile application interface (APP) is designed to provide the user to control the arm remotely. The maximum bending angle of the arm, which can reach to 115.7 degrees, and the jetting distance is up to 60 cm. Some spraying tests were performed to evaluate and verify the effectiveness of proposed bionic arm. The proposed snake bone-armed robot has high degree of freedom and low cost, which is more feasible than the rigid robotic arm. The robotic arm can be installed in the unmanned field mobile robot to perform spraying operation, reducing the burden of labor and the damage of on-site pesticide spraying to farmers.