A small autonomous electrical vehicle as partner for heroic viticulture

On Mount Etna goblet is spreading again among vine growers because of vine quality and taste, after it was abandoned about fifty years ago. Most local farms that use this kind of vine training system are very small and are often characterised by available terrains with high slopes, very narrow path, tight poorly accessible terraces; workers have also to build and maintain the embankment and other structures that the high slope terrain needs. So very high effort is required for cultivating these areas that represents one of the Italian heroic viticulture realities. Goblets is not the only training system used on Mount Etna but even when very simple trellises like wires or stakes are used, terrains and farms conditions are often the same. Such conditions do not allow to use standard machinery that are suitable for bigger farms (because of their cost) and/or bigger parcels (because of their physical size). The aim of this work is to present a small versatile electrical vehicle that has autonomous/assisted navigation capabilities as well as man-guidance option. This robotic system can facilitate workers during harvesting and vineyard management operations such as pruning, spraying, transportation (bins, grapes and other tools). The robot has two rubber tracks and can easily handle payloads up to 200 kg. Its physical dimension and the very low centre of mass, allows the robot to have big manoeuvrability and stability in tight passages with high slope and rough terrain. This is important considering safety aspects for the workers. In order to implement the autonomous navigation capability, an industrial computer and sensors like 2D laser scanner, low cost DGPS system and an inertial measurement unit have been used. The operator can manually interact with the robot using a standard joystick from a remote base station as well as from on-board the robot. When autonomous motion is desired, the system needs a preliminary learning phase through manual guidance during which the desired path is recorded using the GPS information. After that phase, the system is able to execute in autonomous mode the same path. The on-board sensors can implement early detecting of obstacles and dangerous situations. Different trials have been performed on some vineyard farm on Mount Etna, in the Noto (Syracuse, Italy) area and in some greenhouses in Southern Sicily near Scoglitti (Ragusa, Italy) in order to evaluate system performances.