Coordinated Navigation of Two Agricultural Robots in a Vineyard: A Simulation Study

Abstract

The development of an effective agricultural robot presents various challenges in actuation, localization, navigation, sensing, etc., depending on the prescribed task. Moreover, when multiple robots are engaged in an agricultural task, this requires appropriate coordination strategies to be developed to ensure safe, effective, and efficient operation. This paper presents a simulation study that demonstrates a robust coordination strategy for the navigation of two heterogeneous robots, where one robot is the expert and the second robot is the helper in a vineyard. The robots are equipped with localization and navigation capabilities so that they can navigate the environment and appropriately position themselves in the work area. A modular collaborative algorithm is proposed for the coordinated navigation of the two robots in the field via a communications module. Furthermore, the robots are also able to position themselves accurately relative to each other using a vision module in order to effectively perform their cooperative tasks. For the experiments, a realistic simulation environment is considered, and the various control mechanisms are described. Experiments were carried out to investigate the robustness of the various algorithms and provide preliminary results before real-life implementation.

Grape Maturity Estimation for Personalized Agrobot Harvest by Fuzzy Lattice Reasoning (FLR) on an Ontology of Constraints

“…In particular, agrobots are developed in viniculture regarding monitoring [7], harvesting [8], pruning [9] and cluster detection [10]. An approach regarding two cooperative agrobots toward grape harvesting has been reported [11]. The interest here is in "personalized" grape harvesting as explained next.…”