2.1.2. Agricultural Robot

A manually driven or autonomous vehicle is essential in agricultural tasks to perform the necessary actions throughout the working field. In this case, we use a compact mobile platform based on a commercial vehicle manufactured by AgreenCulture SaS, France. This is a tracked platform, and, thus, it operates as a skid-steer mechanism. The track distance can be adapted to the crop row space. Equipped with an engine or batteries, the platform can follow predefined trajectories at 6 km/h with a position accuracy of ±0.015 m using a global positioning system (GPS) based on the real-time kinematic (RTK) technique. This mobile platform is illustrated in Figure 4a.

**Figure 4.** (**a**) Mobile platform (AgreenCulture SaS) and (**b**) autonomous laser weeding system.

#### 2.1.3. Perception System

A perception system is based on computer vision algorithms that obtain, process, analyze, and understand images and data from the environment. With these inputs, the system produces numerical and symbolic information for making decisions. The perception system for this study consists of the following systems:


#### 2.1.4. Agricultural Tools

Agricultural tools focus on direct action on the crop and soil and rely on physical (mechanical, thermal, etc.) or chemical (pesticides, fertilizers, etc.) foundations. This study used a thermal weeding tool based on a high-power laser source that provided lethal laser doses to be deployed on the weed meristems using scanners.

An AI video system provided the positions of the weed meristems. Indeed, this specific solution physically integrated the AI vision system, the laser scanner, and the high-power laser source into the laser-based weeding tool component. The video frames acquired with this system were sent to the central controller at a rate of 4 frames/s. After the mission, all stored images were sent to the cloud.
