Conference Proceedings
The International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Electronics, Computing and Communication 2022
(ICETECC`22)
CROPBot: Customized Rigid Organic Plantation Robot
Aaron Alcantara1*; Glenn V. Magwili1;| 1Mapua University |
ABSTRACT
Philippines continues its plan for becoming industrialized country, despite that fact, it is still an agricultural country for most of its population lives in rural areas and rely on farming to support their needs and it still contributes to the gross domestic product of the country. Agricultural sector contributes 9.28% of the total GDP as of 2018. Though that sector contributes only close to 10%, its employment comprises to 24.3% of the total labor work force in the country. There are some pressing concerns in agricultural sector, obvious reduction of its essential elements -farmers and resources. There is a reduction of employment rate of farmers for the past years from 12, 030 in 2008 and dropped to 10,001 during 2018 . Other concern are problems on resources- land, capital, machinery, seedlings, and the method used in farming. Farmlands degraded due to excessive use of inorganic compound for weeding and as fertilizer and other thing is the soil compaction due to use of heavy farm equipment. Significance of this study is it will offer land farming method more effective and provide a conservative approach to environment. The prototype will serve as an aid to farmers not to reduce them, in fact, with machine, some uncultivated land can be converted to plantation easier thus will result in an increase of farm land area. The prototype was fully custom built having its mechanical parts ease of replacements. Based on the results, the prototype can do the farming tasks even on the compacted soil that has not been used for years for planting though the researcher recommends some design enhancement and modification to attain more precision in farming.