Modified Design of a Precision Planter For a Robotic Assistant Farmer

1-4-Objective 
The main objective of this research is to design a customized planter to retrofit to the 
Grizzly mobile robot for precision farming. This objective can be broken down into the 
following sub-objectives: 
1) To obtain an background knowledge about seeders, planters, their components and 
the forces applied to them. 
2) To study the effect of disc angle and tilt angle on the forces applied to disc coulters. 
3) To design a planter conceptually and then in detail. 
4) To analyze the designed planter for strength. 
5) To fabricate and test the designed planter for evaluation. 

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1-5-Methodology 
This project was done in different steps that led to prototyping and testing of a new 
planter. These steps are as follows: 
1) A thorough study was performed on different types of seeders and planters, their 
components to get more familiar with these equipments. Also a thorough literature 
survey about soil-tool interaction (Disc Coulters) and design of the seeders and 
planters was done. 
2) To find more about disc-soil interaction and to find the optimum disc angle and tilt 
angle that results in minimum draft force, a series of experiments was designed and 
performed in the soil bin.
3) Conceptual design was completed and the first draft of the designed planter was 
created. 
4) Detail design, including static analysis, optimization of press wheel force was 
performed. 
5) Finite Element Method (ANSYS Workbench) was used for stress analysis to verify 
the strength of designed parts under working loads and their safety factors were 
calculated. 
6) Parts for the designed planter was fabricated, assembled and prepared for tests. 
7) Tests were designed for the developed planter, to study its performance in different 
working conditions. The results of the tests, especially the draft force, were compared 
with analytical hand calculations.