Tarzan, the crop monitoring robot

Tarzan, the crop monitoring and also a swinging robot is the brainchild of a research team at Georgia Institute of technology.

Tarzan, the swinging robot 

Read about TerraSentia - another crop monitoring and scouting robot.

This aerial robot is inspired by sloth and replicates its movement and energy conserving nature. To add interest, it is given the name “tarzan”, a famous fictional character known to swing at great speed using branches of trees and hanging vines.

Tarzan is built with carbon fiber arms, reinforced with aluminum. Each arm has a dc motor at its base, and the shafts of those motors are coupled to each other. A bearing on the coupling shaft keeps the payload pod attached securely, while also allowing it to hang parallel to the ground irrespective of the orientation of the arms. The robot’s hands are 3D-printed grippers with embedded IR sensors that can detect when a wire passes them and trigger the grippers to close tightly around it.

The robot works by holding onto a wire with one arm, using its momentum to swing and grabbing the other wire with the second arm. The movement may appear simple when writing down in words but it is definitely not an easy task. Additionally, a high definition video camera and IR camera are to be included so that the robot can take pictures in between each swing to assess the quality of crops. The farmer can now decide on applying pesticides or watering the crops based on the pictures taken.

Potential Applications

There exists one more possibility to potentially use the free arm of the robot to pick vegetables and put it in its basket while swinging down. These types of systems can be deployed in urban environments to traverse along telephone or power wires, inspecting power lines, providing reconfigurable surveillance sensors, air quality monitoring, or even reconfigurable traffic lights.

It's a long way to go.......

Tarzan is still a prototype in the lab. An outdoor agricultural environment, a soybean research facility at Georgina tech, awaits to test Tarzan soon.

Also, Read: Hands Free Hectare Project made complete automation in agriculture a reality