Professor of School of Engineering, Design and Built Environment, Western Sydney University, Australia. His research interests cover Industry 4.0, Additive Manufacturing, Advanced Engineering Materials and Structures (Metals and Composites), Multi-scale Modelling of Materials and Structures, Metal Forming and Metal Surface Treatment.
2024-02-24
2024-01-04
2023-11-02
Manuscript received June 21, 2022; revised July 27, 2022; accepted November 11, 2022.
Abstract—Hand gesture interpretation and control in robotics describe the interconnection between human and machine elements in the computer vision world. The pruning of a structured environment is time-consuming and labourintensive. Therefore, it requires to be managed by a selfpropelled machine. A path planning mode allows the robot to move along a specified path and various studies on lawn robots focus more on obstacle avoidance with limited consideration to proper path planning techniques. Hand gesture interpretation and control is implemented to solve the challenge of path definition. This study is targeted at the development of a solar powered lawn robot using hand gesture control as path planning technique. The robotic system continuously operates using charged batteries via solar energy stored in photovoltaic cells. The robot control mechanism was implemented via the use of infrared sensors to avoid obstruction on its path and hand gesture interpretation via digital signal processing (DSP) for the path planning. The performance evaluation of the robot was based on field experiment and simulation using solid works, defined in terms of area of covered lawn availability, energy utility and optimum turning velocity. The evaluation revealed that the machine’s efficiency is almost 100% based on area covered, percentage availability of the robot is 95% and an average energy utility of 7.7 KWh was also obtained. The optimum turning velocity of 0.096 m/s at work completed time of 20 minutes were obtained by simulation. This robot is found useful for any environment, both structured and semistructured. Keywords—area covered, digital signal processing, hand gesture, robotic, obstacle avoidance Cite: Adefemi O. Adeodu, Rendani W. Maladzhi, and Mukondeleli G. Kana-kana Katumba, "Evaluation of Intelligent Solar Based Hand Gesture Controlled Lawn Robot," International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Robotics Research, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 184-191, May 2023. Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
