Multi Robot Cooperative Area Coverage, Case Study: Spraying

Janani, Alireza; Alboul, Lyuba; Penders, Jacques

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-40379-3_17

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Applying an MRS to a wide orchard can effectively spray the orchard in a short amount of time and with less labor [38]. In [39], a multi-robot cooperative approach have been proposed a strategy by which a team of robots could cooperatively perform area coverage related tasks in a known environment. The focus of this approach is to perform task allocation and coordination using only the robots' local position information.…”

Section: Related Work a Related Work In Mrs For Sprayingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Voronoi Diagram-Based Workspace Partition for Weak Cooperation of Multi-Robot System in Orchard

Kim

Son

2020

IEEE Access

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Nowadays, multi-robot systems are being utilized to perform agricultural tasks. It is particularly essential to robotize pesticide spraying because of the risk of poisoning workers. However, the problem is that the human-driven sprayers are big size, and difficult to maneuver in many orchards. Therefore, heavy spraying robots must be replaced with lighter robots. Also, it takes a lot of times to perform spraying using only one sprayer in a large orchard. To achieve this goal, the multi-robot system (MRS) can be applied to the spraying by robot cooperation to improve performance. In this study, we developed a task allocation system based on a Voronoi diagram for a multi-robot spraying system in an orchard. The seed point for area partition using the Voronoi diagram was obtained through node clustering using a k-means clustering algorithm. In the experiment, workspaces were partitioned according to the number of robots, from 2 to 10. A total of four metrics were used to evaluate the performance of the system. The results confirmed that our task allocation system is applicable to real orchards. INDEX TERMS Agricultural robot, multi-robot system, task allocation, area partition, unmanned ground vehicle (UGV).

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Section: Related Work a Related Work In Mrs For Sprayingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Voronoi Diagram-Based Workspace Partition for Weak Cooperation of Multi-Robot System in Orchard

Kim

Son

2020

IEEE Access

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“…The experiments were conducted in a land area replicating a farm using miniature prototype robots equipped with tools to perform farming operations. The work presented in [62] dealt with a spraying task by a team of robots using local information only. Simulations were utilized to demonstrate the proposed strategy's capacity to perform task allocation.…”

Section: Ugv Robot Teams (Multi-ugv)mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Overview of Cooperative Robotics in Agriculture

et al. 2021

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Agricultural robotics has been a popular subject in recent years from an academic as well as a commercial point of view. This is because agricultural robotics addresses critical issues such as seasonal shortages in manual labor, e.g., during harvest, as well as the increasing concern regarding environmentally friendly practices. On one hand, several individual agricultural robots have already been developed for specific tasks (e.g., for monitoring, spraying, harvesting, transport, etc.) with varying degrees of effectiveness. On the other hand, the use of cooperative teams of agricultural robots in farming tasks is not as widespread; yet, it is an emerging trend. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of the work carried out so far in the area of cooperative agricultural robotics and identifies the state-of-the-art. This paper also outlines challenges to be addressed in fully automating agricultural production; the latter is promising for sustaining an increasingly vast human population, especially in cases of pandemics such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic.

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“…Most of the existing studies rely heavily on the existence of communication between robots, however, in some domains it is infeasible to maintain communications. To overcome this problem in the agricultural domain, Janani et al [22], [23] proposed a solution that used indirect communication, observing the visual trails of the other robots to guide the coverage. This kind of a solution is impractical in aerial or marine explorations, as any trail disappears very fast in such environments.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Efficient multi-robot coverage of a known environment

Karapetyan

Benson

McKinney

et al. 2017

2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)

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This paper addresses the complete area coverage problem of a known environment by multiple-robots. Complete area coverage is the problem of moving an end-effector over all available space while avoiding existing obstacles. In such tasks, using multiple robots can increase the efficiency of the area coverage in terms of minimizing the operational time and increase the robustness in the face of robot attrition. Unfortunately, the problem of finding an optimal solution for such an area coverage problem with multiple robots is known to be NPcomplete. In this paper we present two approximation heuristics for solving the multi-robot coverage problem. The first solution presented is a direct extension of an efficient single robot area coverage algorithm, based on an exact cellular decomposition. The second algorithm is a greedy approach that divides the area into equal regions and applies an efficient single-robot coverage algorithm to each region. We present experimental results for two algorithms. Results indicate that our approaches provide good coverage distribution between robots and minimize the workload per robot, meanwhile ensuring complete coverage of the area.Index Terms-Multiple and distributed robots, path planning, coverage.

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Multi Robot Cooperative Area Coverage, Case Study: Spraying

Cited by 10 publications

References 10 publications

A Voronoi Diagram-Based Workspace Partition for Weak Cooperation of Multi-Robot System in Orchard

A Voronoi Diagram-Based Workspace Partition for Weak Cooperation of Multi-Robot System in Orchard

An Overview of Cooperative Robotics in Agriculture

Efficient multi-robot coverage of a known environment

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