Auto-Integrating Agricultural End-Effector Quick-Change System

Abstract

Agricultural mobile manipulators must perform diverse field operations—pruning, harvesting, spraying, and sampling—each requiring a specialized end-effector, yet manual software reconfiguration after every tool change creates downtime and demands expertise unavailable in the field. This work presents an automatic tool-change system for Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) mobile manipulators that lets non-expert operators switch tasks by physically attaching a tool. On attachment, embedded electronics broadcast a unique identifier that triggers autonomous reconfiguration of the motion-planning stack, kinematic models, and control parameters on the robot’s local computer. A 3D-printed passive twist-lock coupling rated to IP44 is combined with GPIO-based identification, adding only 124.5 g (3.1% of payload). Validation on a Kinova Gen3 arm aboard a Husky A200 ground robot demonstrates 10.2 s task-switching latency across shovel and rake end-effectors, advancing modular agricultural robotics for resource-constrained farms and research facilities.