The agricultural sector is constantly evolving. The rise in the world’s population generates an increasingly growing demand for food, resulting in the need for the agroindustry to meet this demand. Tractors are the vehicles that have made a real difference in agriculture’s development throughout history, lowering costs in soil tillage and facilitating activities and operations for workers. This study aims to successfully design and build an autonomous, electric agricultural tractor that can autonomously perform recurring tasks in open-field and greenhouse applications. This project is fully part of the new industrial and agronomic revolution, known as Factory 4.0 and Agriculture 4.0. The predetermined functional requirements for the vehicle are its lightweight, accessible price, the easy availability of its spare parts, and its simple, ordinary maintenance. In this first study, the preliminary phases of sizing and conceptual design of the rover are reported before subsequently proceeding to the dynamical analysis. To optimize the design of the various versions of the automated vehicle, it is decided that a standard chassis would be built based on a robot operating inside a greenhouse on soft and flat terrains. The SimScape multi-body environment is used to model the kinematics of the non-back-drivable screw jack mechanism for the hitch-lifting arms. The control unit for the force exerted is designed and analyzed by means of an inverse dynamics simulation to evaluate the force and electric power consumed by the actuators. The results obtained from the analysis are essential for the final design of the autonomous electric tractor.

This paper addresses the phenomenon of sloshing and the issues that arise during liquid handling at visual inspection stations. The pharmaceutical industry, recently put under pressure by the pandemic, has long adopted modular solutions consisting mainly of robotic islands. This work focuses on a visual inspection island for glass vials and ampules called VRU. This machine uses robotic arms to optimize the inspection process and enables automated control of a wide range of products using image recognition techniques and AI algorithms. However, the handling of containers in the presence of liquids requires special precautions to avoid the occurrence of bubbles inside the fluid that can prevent the cameras from correctly capturing any defects present. The banal solution involves a drastic reduction in the speeds and accelerations to which the liquids are subjected. However, using appropriate techniques makes it possible to achieve performance values similar to those obtainable when manipulating solid materials. The developed algorithms were tested using multibody simulations in the Mathworks Simscape environment and then validated using a six-axis Fanuc robot. In this study, however, the analysis conducted aimed to determine the correlations between trajectories, laws of motion, and sloshing in containers handled at high speed in industrial applications. In this study a multibody model was developed using a CFD analysis. The container consisted of a glass vial for pharmaceutical uses containing a liquid inside. The results obtained from the CFD analysis allowed us to calibrate the multibody model for the next phase of optimization of the laws of motion to be followed by the manipulator.