Agibot: An Open-Source Modular Swerve-Drive Robot Platform for Agricultural Robotics Research and Education

Agricultural production faces persistent labor shortages and increasing demand for automation, yet progress in agricultural robotics remains constrained by the limited availability of affordable, flexible, and accessible research platforms. This paper presents Agibot, an open-source, modular, low-cost agricultural robotics platform designed for autonomy research and experimentation, with potential applications in hands-on robotics education. The platform integrates four-wheel independent swerve drive, swappable computing, distributed embedded control, multimodal sensing, and configurable manipulation within a unified sense-plan-act-verify framework supporting perception, control, navigation, manipulation, and autonomous task verification. The platform was evaluated through representative row-crop navigation and manipulation tasks under varying lighting and soil conditions. Experiments demonstrated reliable lane following, autonomous row-to-row navigation, target identification, seed dispensing, plant manipulation, and closed-loop verification of task success. Its modular architecture supports independent testing, modification, and validation of autonomy components for rapid prototyping and experimentation. These proof-of-concept tasks, controller-tuning studies, and integrated trials demonstrate the platform's research capabilities, while its accessible and reconfigurable design supports its use for hands-on robotics education. By combining affordability, modularity, open-source accessibility, configurable manipulation, and end-to-end sense-plan-act-verify autonomy, Agibot provides a practical platform for agricultural robotics research, technology development, and workforce training.