Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system with applications in urban/indoor precision agriculture. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. By embedding sensing, computation, and communication into the pots, task allocation in the system is de-centrally coordinated, which makes the system scalable and robust against the failure of a centralized agent. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition, and manipulation as well as challenges that lie ahead toward autonomous precision agriculture with multi-robot teams.

[1]  Anthony Stentz,et al.  The Focussed D* Algorithm for Real-Time Replanning , 1995, IJCAI.

[2]  Kuan Chong Ting,et al.  Visual feedback guided robotic cherry tomato harvesting , 1996 .

[3]  Jose L Pons,et al.  A SURVEY OF COMPUTER VISION METHODS FOR LOCATING FRUIT ON TREES , 2000 .

[4]  R. Noble,et al.  AE—Automation and Emerging Technologies , 2001 .

[5]  S. Jagannathan,et al.  Approximation-based control and avoidance of a mobile base with an onboard arm for MARS greenhouse operation , 2001, Proceeding of the 2001 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control (ISIC '01) (Cat. No.01CH37206).

[6]  J. Bontsema,et al.  An Autonomous Robot for Harvesting Cucumbers in Greenhouses , 2002, Auton. Robots.

[7]  Albert-Jan Baerveldt,et al.  An Agricultural Mobile Robot with Vision-Based Perception for Mechanical Weed Control , 2002, Auton. Robots.

[8]  Yael Edan,et al.  Design of an autonomous agricultural robot , 2004, Applied Intelligence.

[9]  Antonio Torralba,et al.  Sharing features: efficient boosting procedures for multiclass object detection , 2004, CVPR 2004.

[10]  W. S. Lee,et al.  Robotic Weed Control System for Tomatoes , 2004, Precision Agriculture.

[11]  Sanjiv Singh,et al.  Integrated wireless sensor/actuator networks in an agricultural application , 2004, SenSys '04.

[12]  Maohua Wang,et al.  Wireless sensors in agriculture and food industry — Recent development and future perspective , 2005 .

[13]  Shigehiko Hayashi,et al.  A New Challenge of Robot for Harvesting Strawberry Grown on Table Top Culture , 2005 .

[14]  J. Stafford,et al.  The potential contribution of precision irrigation to water conservation. , 2005 .

[15]  François Chaumette,et al.  Visual servo control. I. Basic approaches , 2006, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine.

[16]  Seth Hutchinson,et al.  Visual Servo Control Part I: Basic Approaches , 2006 .

[17]  Johnny Park,et al.  Segmentation of Apple Fruit from Video via Background Modeling , 2006 .

[18]  Ning Wang,et al.  Review: Wireless sensors in agriculture and food industry-Recent development and future perspective , 2006 .

[19]  Yunseop Kim,et al.  Instrumentation and Control for Wireless Sensor Network for Automated Irrigation , 2006 .

[20]  Ancha Srinivasan,et al.  Handbook of Precision Agriculture: Principles and Applications , 2006 .

[21]  Antonio Torralba,et al.  LabelMe: A Database and Web-Based Tool for Image Annotation , 2008, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[22]  J. V. Stafford,et al.  A systems view of agricultural robots. , 2007 .

[23]  Michael Beetz,et al.  Robots in the kitchen: Exploiting ubiquitous sensing and actuation , 2008, Robotics Auton. Syst..

[24]  Tateshi Fujiura,et al.  Cherry-harvesting robot , 2008 .

[25]  Alessandro Saffiotti,et al.  The PEIS-Ecology project: Vision and results , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[26]  Nikolaus Correll,et al.  SwisTrack - a flexible open source tracking software for multi-agent systems , 2008, 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[27]  Nikolaus Correll,et al.  Distributed boundary coverage with a team of networked miniature robots using a robust market-based algorithm , 2008, Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence.

[28]  Mac Schwager,et al.  Decentralized, Adaptive Coverage Control for Networked Robots , 2009, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[29]  Huan Liu,et al.  Building a distributed robot garden , 2009, 2009 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[30]  Morgan Quigley,et al.  ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System , 2009, ICRA 2009.

[31]  The Any-Com Approach to Multi-Robot Coordination , 2010 .