AgriCruiser: An Open Source Agriculture Robot for Over-the-row Navigation
Kenny Truong, Yongkyu Lee, Jason Irie, Shivam Kumar Panda, Mohammad Jony, Shahab Ahmad, Md. Mukhlesur Rahman, M. Khalid Jawed
TL;DR
AgriCruiser addresses labor shortages, safety, and environmental concerns by providing an open-source, low-cost over-the-row robot. It combines a reconfigurable chassis with a two-wheel front-drive and passive casters, enabling tight headland turns and multi-crop traversal, while integrating a precision herbicide sprayer for weed management. Field validation across flax, canola, and wheat showed dramatic weed density reductions (24- to 42-fold) with reduced crop damage, and demonstrated traversal across diverse terrains with measurable torque headroom. The open-source design and modular software support rapid replication and extension to sensing, phenotyping, irrigation, and harvesting tasks, potentially enabling scalable, sustainable farm robotics.
Abstract
We present the AgriCruiser, an open-source over-the-row agricultural robot developed for low-cost deployment and rapid adaptation across diverse crops and row layouts. The chassis provides an adjustable track width of 1.42 m to 1.57 m, along with a ground clearance of 0.94 m. The AgriCruiser achieves compact pivot turns with radii of 0.71 m to 0.79 m, enabling efficient headland maneuvers. The platform is designed for the integration of the other subsystems, and in this study, a precision spraying system was implemented to assess its effectiveness in weed management. In twelve flax plots, a single robotic spray pass reduced total weed populations (pigweed and Venice mallow) by 24- to 42-fold compared to manual weeding in four flax plots, while also causing less crop damage. Mobility experiments conducted on concrete, asphalt, gravel, grass, and both wet and dry soil confirmed reliable traversal consistent with torque sizing. The complete chassis can be constructed from commodity T-slot extrusion with minimal machining, resulting in a bill of materials costing approximately $5,000 - $6,000, which enables replication and customization. The mentioned results demonstrate that low-cost, reconfigurable over-the-row robots can achieve effective weed management with reduced crop damage and labor requirements, while providing a versatile foundation for phenotyping, sensing, and other agriculture applications. Design files and implementation details are released to accelerate research and adoption of modular agricultural robotics.