Evolutionary Greenhouse Layout Optimization for Rapid and Safe Robot Navigation

There has been a rapid increase in demand for premium and safe agricultural products. Protected systems, such as greenhouses, are being adopted to meet demand. Ease in environmental regulation required for optimal plant growth is one of the advantages of protected systems. However, drawbacks such as poor ventilation in greenhouses can be fatal to the human workforce. This has led to the development of robots for hazardous tasks. Considering mobile robots are required to navigate down every aisle to perform a task in a greenhouse, and it is difficult to predict at which point the robot will need to return to the start point, to offload or refill for transportation and spraying schedules, respectively or battery charges. It will be commercially constraining to manufacture robots for every greenhouse specification. Efficient navigation can be done through path planning or layout design. In this paper, the greenhouse layout optimization problem was formulated to find optimal points on each bed to create an access path that would enable a reduction in the total travel time from all points in the greenhouse to the base point. The optimization problem was solved using differential evolution (DE), an evolutionary algorithm. Furthermore, we considered: 1) required space for inter-bed and rotary robot navigation; 2) standard bed specification; 3) area of the greenhouse; and 4) base point for starting and terminating navigation. The applicability of the proposed method was demonstrated by carrying out the experimental simulations on several greenhouse sizes.

[1]  Senorpe Asem-hiablie Estrogen occurrence, transport, and biological effects resulting from wastewater reuse in irrigation and aquaculture , 2013 .

[2]  P. Weintraub,et al.  Mites for the control of pests in protected cultivation. , 2007, Pest management science.

[3]  T. Hertz,et al.  Is There A Farm Labor Shortage , 2013 .

[4]  Maurizio Schenone,et al.  Warehouse layout design: minimizing travel time with a genetic and simulative approach - methodology and case study , 2002 .

[5]  T. Villgrattner,et al.  Design and development of a redundant modular multipurpose agricultural manipulator , 2012, 2012 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM).

[6]  Tho Le-Duc,et al.  Travel time estimation and order batching in a 2-block warehouse , 2007, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[7]  Koichi Osuka,et al.  Design and control of a heavy material handling manipulator for agricultural robots , 2008, Auton. Robots.

[8]  James J.H. Liou,et al.  Using a multiple-GA method to solve the batch picking problem: considering travel distance and order due time , 2008 .

[9]  Mehmet Fatih Tasgetiren,et al.  Differential evolution algorithm with ensemble of parameters and mutation strategies , 2011, Appl. Soft Comput..

[10]  William MacKunis,et al.  Robust visual servo control in the presence of fruit motion for robotic citrus harvesting , 2016, Comput. Electron. Agric..

[11]  E. J. van Henten,et al.  Field Test of an Autonomous Cucumber Picking Robot , 2003 .

[12]  Marc W. van Iersel,et al.  An automated system for controlling drought stress and irrigation in potted plants , 2006 .

[13]  Jean B. Lasserre,et al.  Pythagoras' Theorem for Areas , 2001, Am. Math. Mon..

[14]  Antonio Barrientos,et al.  Robots in Agriculture: State of Art and Practical Experiences , 2018 .

[15]  Christos A Damalas,et al.  Farmers’ Exposure to Pesticides: Toxicity Types and Ways of Prevention , 2016, Toxics.

[16]  Minghao Yin,et al.  Modified differential evolution with self-adaptive parameters method , 2016, J. Comb. Optim..

[17]  Shivaji Bachche,et al.  Deliberation on Design Strategies of Automatic Harvesting Systems: A Survey , 2015, Robotics.

[18]  NOUD GADEMANN,et al.  Order batching to minimize total travel time in a parallel-aisle warehouse , 2005 .

[19]  S. T. Murphy,et al.  Balancing biological control strategies in the IPM of New World invasive Liriomyza leafminers in field vegetable crops. , 1999 .

[20]  Jan Karasek,et al.  An Overview of Warehouse Optimization , 2013 .

[21]  Roberto Testezlaf,et al.  A REAL-TIME IRRIGATION CONTROL SYSTEM FOR GREENHOUSES , 1997 .

[22]  E Capri,et al.  Potential operator exposure to procymidone in greenhouses. , 1999, Journal of agricultural and food chemistry.

[23]  Christoph Schuetz,et al.  Evaluation of a direct optimization method for trajectory planning of a 9-DOF redundant fruit-picking manipulator , 2015, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

[24]  I. Eleftherohorinos,et al.  Pesticide Exposure, Safety Issues, and Risk Assessment Indicators , 2011, International journal of environmental research and public health.

[25]  Russell D. Meller,et al.  Aisle configurations for unit-load warehouses , 2009 .

[26]  Umut Rifat Tuzkaya,et al.  A particle swarm optimization algorithm for the multiple-level warehouse layout design problem , 2008, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[27]  E. J. Pekkeriet,et al.  A robot for harvesting sweet-pepper in greenhouses , 2014 .

[28]  I. A. Hameed,et al.  Intelligent Coverage Path Planning for Agricultural Robots and Autonomous Machines on Three-Dimensional Terrain , 2014, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[29]  Nitaigour P. Mahalik,et al.  Autonomous Greenhouse Mobile Robot Driving Strategies From System Integration Perspective: Review and Application , 2015, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[30]  Tomonari Furukawa,et al.  Autonomous Pesticide Spraying Robot for use in a Greenhouse , 2005 .

[31]  J. Marasovic,et al.  Networked embedded greenhouse monitoring and control , 2003, Proceedings of 2003 IEEE Conference on Control Applications, 2003. CCA 2003..

[32]  J. C. Lenteren,et al.  Biological and Integrated Pest control in Greenhouses , 1988 .

[33]  Russell D. Meller,et al.  Optimizing fishbone aisles for dual‐command operations in a warehouse , 2009 .

[34]  Xiangtao Li,et al.  Multi-Population Based Ensemble Mutation Method for Single Objective Bilevel Optimization Problem , 2016, IEEE Access.

[35]  Jangwoo Park,et al.  Wireless Sensor Network-Based Greenhouse Environment Monitoring and Automatic Control System for Dew Condensation Prevention , 2011, Sensors.

[36]  Kees Jan Roodbergen,et al.  Design and control of warehouse order picking: A literature review , 2006, Eur. J. Oper. Res..

[37]  H.-J. Tantau,et al.  Optimal control for plant production in greenhouses , 1991 .

[38]  J. Sánchez-Hermosilla,et al.  Navigation Techniques for Mobile Robots in Greenhouses , 2009 .