Design, Development and Application of a Drone-Integrated Cutting Mechanism for Agriculture

In Malaysia, one of the industrial crop resources is coconut, where the coconut-based products have varied usage and are being exported to other countries. Hence, it contributes to increasing Malaysia's profit, but the industrial crops face challenges in providing a large scale of coconuts because of high demands from manufacturers. Besides, the manual coconut plucking process is a labour-intensive and time-consuming task, demands skilled climbers, and is exposed to safety risks. Thus, this paper presents the design a cutting mechanism and drone for coconut harvesting and to test the performance of real-time camera feed visualization and the cutting process for the drone. The chosen type of drone for this project is a quadcopter drone, and the drone's body is designed on Autodesk Fusion 360 and printed using a 3D printer with PLA filament. The Arduino UNO board acts as a central controller that connects other components such as the MPU6050, receiver, and ESCs. The ESP32 CAM acts as an eye to display the location of coconuts on the tree. The DC motor and steel saw blade is used as cutting mechanism. The results showed that the ESP32 CAM successfully visualized real-time video streaming with minimal lag, while the cutting mechanism able to cut through the rolled paper and branch within a practical timeframe.