Autonomous Multi-Robot System for use in Vineyards and Orchards

Abstract

Agricultural engineering is moving towards a future that contains autonomous robots similar to other fields such as the automotive and aerospace industry. Planning systems based on autonomous robots is associated with many challenges in various areas such as navigation, guidance, communication, software, logic, hardware and more. The present work focused on the challenges related to guidance, navigation, and control of an autonomous robot inside a vineyard or an orchard. Unreliable GPS signal, constantly changing three-dimensional obstacles, changing lighting conditions, and winds are just a few examples of the challenges posed by the agricultural environment. Previous research has addressed this issue using sophisticated and expensive robots that contain high-quality sensors and powerful computers. Despite extensive research, it is difficult to find systems that have become commercial, mainly due to the high cost of these systems. This research offers an alternative, more affordable solution, working with a group of small unmanned ground vehicles and quad copter that work together to achieve a common goal. The ground robots use a small set of affordable sensors which are combined with information produced by processing the quadcopter images. In addition to reduced cost, the autonomous multi-robots system approach also provides other advantages such as increased system reliability. This work included numerical experiments and a series of field experiments that verified the performance of the system under real conditions.