Abstract

This paper presents Thorvald II, a modular, highly re-configurable, all-weather mobile robot intended for applications in the agricultural domain. Researchers working with mobile agricultural robots tend to work in a wide variety of environments such as open fields, greenhouses, and polytunnels. Until now agricultural robots have been designed to operate in only one type of environment, with no or limited possibilities for customization. Thorvald II is a new module-based robot design that allows for vastly different robots to be built using the same basic modules, and rebuilt using only basic hand tools. The modules are designed to enable high quality robots that can quickly be customized for a given application in a given environment.