“An autonomous, sustainable robot that takes care of plants. Built from scratch, the Irrigator runs TFLite object detection on Jetson Nano.
The Irrigator: AI-powered irrigation robot
The Irrigator is an autonomous, sustainable, smart robot that takes care of indoor and outdoor plants. This presentation focuses on watering the plants, but the design and implementation can be extended to perform other tasks such as dispensing fertilizer and pesticide, detecting the level of water in the soil, detecting sick plants.
Design
Broad design goals:
Autonomous - it does its job with no (or minimum) human interaction.
Sustainable - it uses solar energy to recharge its battery, rainwater to refill its water tank, and it’s made out of recycled materials, wherever possible (e.g. I have used recycled wood, metal, and screws for the chassis).
Smart - it uses computer vision and machine learning to perform complex tasks.
Specific design goals:
Nvidia Jetson Nano - to be used as the central control unit where advanced machine learning inference can be run.
Nvidia Isaac SDK - to be used as the programming platform for the robot.
The overall diagram of the robot with its main modules is shown in Fig. 1, while the actual implementation is shown in Fig. 2.”