  The usage of drones and rovers helps to overcome the limitations of
traditional agriculture which has been predominantly human-intensive, for
carrying out tasks such as removal of weeds and spraying of fertilizers and
pesticides. Drones and rovers are helping to realize precision agriculture and
farmers with improved monitoring and surveying at affordable costs. Major
benefits have come for vertical farming and fields with irrigation canals.
However, drones have a limitation of flight time due to payload constraints.
Rovers have limitations in vertical farming and obstacles like canals in
agricultural fields. To meet the different requirements of multiple terrains
and vertical farming in agriculture, we propose an autonomous hybrid
drone-rover vehicle that combines the advantages of both rovers and drones. The
prototype is described along with experimental results regarding its ability to
avoid obstacles, pluck weeds and spray pesticides.

Robotics