Voice controlled drone automates fruit picking with smart path planning
IVG-UAV: An Intelligent Voice-Guided UAV System for Autonomous Ripe Fruit Harvesting with Vision-Based Classification and Adaptive Path Planning
Robotics
Summary
Picking fruit by hand is hard work and expensive on big farms in hot places. The authors designed a drone that listens to voice commands, sees if fruit is ripe using its camera, and plans its flying path to pick fruit by itself. They tested their system using a computer simulation to see how well it works. This approach could change how farms pick fruit in the future.
What this means in practice
- •For agricultural automation teams: Automate fruit harvesting tasks in large plantations by combining voice commands with vision-guided drones for ripeness detection and efficient path flying.
- •For drone system developers: Integrate voice recognition and adaptive route planning into UAVs for complex outdoor tasks requiring dynamic decision-making based on sensor input.
Tested on simulated data.
Authors
Dinh Trung Duong
Abstract
In tropical regions, their agricultural sectors remain highly dependent on manual labor for fruit harvesting. On large-scale farms, this dependency often results in significant labor cost and logistic complexities. This project presents the development and simulation of a voice-controlled Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system designed to automate harvesting tasks in extensive plantations. The proposed system integrates speech recognition using Whisper [1] and LLM, computer vision-based ripeness classification, and adaptive path planning within a unified framework. The entire system is modeled and validated in a Gazebo simulation environment, allowing performance evaluation under controlled agricultural scenarios