محمدرضا کماندار

The stems of evergreen shrub like buxus, privet and… are pruned by manual hedge trimmer or gasoline powered hedge trimmer in conventional pruning systems. To eliminate the difficulties and danger of working with current pruning machines, a pruning robot was fabricated in University of Tehran. This paper focuses on the economic feasibility of applying agricultural autonomous robot, compared to conventional pruning systems. The comparison was based on a systems analysis and an individual economic feasibility study for each of the two kind of applications. In study case, the costs and potential benefits of the potential commercial use of pruning robot with gasoline powered hedge trimmer was compared. The model frame, was included changes in initial investments, labor costs, change in speed, daily working hours, energy consumption and surveillance costs for the two mentioned scenarios. The results showed that, the robotic application is more economically feasible than the conventional systems and the high cost of navigation system increase the cost of the robotic system. An initial outcome from this study indicates that robotics systems are more flexible than conventional systems and may reduce labor costs and restrictions on the number of daily working hours significantly. The results showed that, the shift to agricultural autonomous robot would decrease the implement investments to about 15% and decrease the sum of annual labor and machinery costs to approximately 90%. The autonomous pruning robot is the most economically and may further improve flexibility and expand the daily time constraints to night operations in the field and improve the efficiency.