TATSUNO JunyaDepartment of Mechanical Engineering Professor/Director/Assistant Dean |
An outline of the Advanced Robotic Technology Research Center, Kindai University Fundamental Technology for Next Generation Research Institute is given. The research activities of the Advanced Robotic Technology Research Center are classified into the following five fields, field robotics, medical and welfare robot, dynamics controlled robot, soft-robotics, and parallel link robot.
The study aims to develop automatic transplanting equipment for chain pot seedlings. We intend to practice the shaft tillage cultivation using an autonomous farming robot. We had developed an autonomous working vehicle and automatic transplanting equipment for plug seedlings used in shaft tillage cultivation. To reinforce the robot system's versatility, we developed transplanting equipment for the chain pot seedlings. We experimentally investigated the transplanting performance. Approximately 84% of the seedlings were automatically transplanted using the developed equipment. Since the equipment was performed well in the failure samples, we assumed that the cause of such failures was attributed to seedling quality. In addition, we measured the power consumption of the equipment used to build an electrical power supply system. Consequently, we calculated the power requirements for each process. Compared with the plug seedling equipment developed in the previous study, the chain pot seedlings' power requirement was lower because the conveying actions of seedlings were different. In the next stage of our research, to construct a fully automatic system, we will consider the seedling raising method in which seedlings can become uniformly high-quality and investigate the plant establishment performance using the developed equipment.
Planting works of Allium × wakegi Araki bulbs is too heavy for old farmers to practice in the field because they have to work with half vent posture. Thus, the mechanization of the bulb planting process has been desired. When the bulbs are planted into the soil, farmers vertically put bulbs into the soil, and half of the bulbs are below the soil surface eventually. From a realistic viewpoint, it is necessary to develop an affordable system that can realize such a complicated process. This paper reports a trial of the development of a planting machine for the Allium × wakegi Araki Bulbs.
We studied shaft tillage cultivation as practiced by an autonomous robot. Through previous studies, we found that leg locomotion has a higher compatibility with the shaft tillage method than wheeled locomotion. Therefore, we are currently developing a legged robot for shaft tillage cultivation. In this article, we will report the progress on developing the real scale model of the legged robot. In particular, we describe the development of a backlash free servo module for the swing leg motion, the power transmission method of the standing leg and the sensing method of the ground contact.