Agri_q: Agriculture UGV for Monitoring and Drone Landing

Recently, both the academic community and the industry are showing a radical growth of interest in service robotics and the International Federation of Robotic (IFR) reports an increase of the specific market higher than 10%. One of the most interesting branch of service robotics is the agricultural robotics. This work relates with the development of a novel UGV (Unmanned Ground Vehicle), named Agri_q, intended to perform crops monitoring and to permit aerial robots landing, carrying and recharging. At first, the working conditions and the design requirements are specified. Then, both a qualitative and a type synthesis of the rover locomotion system and of the chassis reconfiguration mechanism is performed. Subsequently, a dimensional synthesis focused on the choice of the kinematic pair positions and on the link lengths determination is carried out; the aim is to satisfy the design requirements, taking into account the workspace, the transmission angle, and the transmission ratio. In addition, interference problems and technical feasibility are considered and the number of needed actuators is minimized. Finally, a preliminary design solution, which satisfies the peculiar requirements of this UGV, is presented.