Labour in the agricultural sector is in short supply, while a large portion of the work is still being done manually. To speed up the work and guarantee the food supply of the future, Lely has started a project on agricultural automation. The aim of the project is to create a robot that can perform multiple repetitive tasks simultaneously, to allow for a large portion of the weekly work to be automated.

As a first step in the automation process, the decision was made to create a specialised robot arm. The hardware and software design of this robot arm will be discussed in this thesis. Arm control including inverse kinematics was built from scratch to optimise for a SCARA type robot arm while keeping the required processing power low.

To evaluate the arm design, lab tests were conducted on a specific task. During the lab test, the task was performed by the designed robot arm.
An average of 20 consecutive successful runs has been achieved. Although these results are promising, there is room for improvement in both the object detection, as well as the smooth control of the robot arm.

In this thesis, the implementation of a passive, chipless, frequency coded RFID detection system for bedload transport studies is proposed. The proposed tag will be deployed in the semi-arid Río Colorado, Bolivia with the aim to develop quantitative sediment transport models that relate transport to grain size. Different algorithms are explored and implemented in Matlab and measurement results are discussed.

In this thesis, the implementation of a passive, chipless, frequency coded Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tag for bedload transport studies is proposed. The proposed tag will be deployed in the semi-arid Río Colorado river, Bolivia with the aim to develop quantitative sediment transport models that relate transport to grain size. The designed tag is an open-loop resonator with a fragment-loading structure, that has an op- timised configuration based on a Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm based on Decomposition combined with Enhanced Genetic Operators (MOEA/D-GO). The designed RFID tag can ideally reach a size of 4 by 4 millimetres with a maximum calculated reading range of 1.3 meters, and operates in the ultra wide band from 3 to 7 gigahertz. Numerous simulations on the tags were run to verify their properties. The tags proved to have a good directivity, quality factor and radio cross section on its resonant frequency. The tags could reach resonance frequencies as low as 2.9 gigahertz and quality factors as high as 130. The proof of concept on a Printed Circuit Board with an FR-4 substrate results in a tag of 6.4 by 3.4 millimetres. Unfortunately, these properties could not yet be verified by measuremen