An Edge AI and Adaptive Embedded System Design for Agricultural Robotics Applications

摘要

This work presents the AgrBot, an agricultural robot designed to intelligently estimate and predict crop pest and disease severity (PDS). The AgrBot incorporates two binarized neural network (BNN) hardware modules for recognizing target crops and estimating their PDS. In a resource-constrained FPGA-based design, these BNN hardware modules can be configured on-demand, showcasing system adaptivity. Furthermore, a multimodal model that integrates crop images, sensor data, and time features is presented for predicting PDS. Employing edge artificial intelligence (AI) through the BNN hardware modules and the multimodal model enables the AgrBot to determine if biological agents are applied to protect crops from pests and diseases, creating a comprehensive agricultural cyber-physical system (CPS). Experimental results demonstrate accuracies of 76.3% for recognizing target crops, 65.3% for estimating PDS, and 67% for predicting PDS. In comparison to existing microprocessor-based design methods, the AgrBot's BNN hardware modules improve frames per second (FPS) by a factor of 790, while the multimodal model reduces processing time by up to 50.9%.