Conference PaperThis study proposes the use of an autonomous rover to harvest cotton bolls before defoliation and as the bolls open. This would expand the harvest window to up to 50 days and make cotton production more profitable for farmers by picking cotton before the quality is at risk. We developed a cotton harvesting rover that is a center-articulated vehicle with an x- y picking manipulator and a combination vacuum and rotating tines end-effector to pull bolls off the plant. The rover uses a stereo camera to see rows, RTK-GPS to localize itself, fisheye camera for heading, and stereo camera to locate the cotton bolls. The SMACH library is a ROS-independent task-level architecture used to build state machines for the rapid implementation of the robot behavior. First, the GPS waypoints are obtained, and then, the rover passes over the rows while picking the cotton bolls. The navigation is controlled by a modified pure-pursuit technique together with a PID controller. Two parallel programs organize the entire rover regarding when to pick and when to navigate. While navigating, the rover looks for harvestable bolls, and when bolls are discovered, the robot will stop and pick. It will do this repetitive work until it finishes all the rows. The rover navigation had an absolute error mean of 0.189 m, a median of 0.172 m, a standard deviation of 0.137 m, and a maximum of 0.986 m. The largest errors occurred during turning around at the end of rows and were caused by wet conditions and tire slippage. The rover picked cotton bolls at the average Action Success Ratio (ASR) of 78.5% and was able to reach 95% of the bolls. Most bolls that were not picked could not be pulled into the vacuum using the rotating tines on the end-effector.