The Agri.q Mobile Robot: Preliminary Experimental Tests

Precision agriculture is a management strategy aimed at enhancing the productivity, profitability, and sustainability of agricultural production from incorporation of technological advances primarily developed for other industries. Among them, robotics is playing a leading role for it allows monitoring with unprecedented punctuality the number of factors affecting the production processes. In this scenario the researchers at Politecnico di Torino developed an innovative unmanned ground vehicle expressly featured for accomplishment of monitoring tasks, with particular focus on the vine cultivation industry which is peculiarly strong in the region. The rover, named Agri.q, is an eight-wheeled mobile robot whose conceptual design has been already presented to the scientific community. This paper presents the first experimental results gathered on the prototype under different conditions of use, in order to illustrate the actual performance of Agri.q in its work environment.