In this work, coverage of agricultural fields using a team of autonomous unmanned ground robots with no human intervention is investigated. To this end, field is first represented by a topological mapandthenadistributedenergy-awaredeployment strategy is proposed to optimally distribute robots with the aim of persistent monitoring of specified regions of interest. When a robot participating in the coverage task approaches a low energy reserve, the team of robots collectively and cooperatively adjust the coverage formation to allow the agent to return to a designated base station, where it can recharge before rejoining the effort. Preliminary (simulation) results are provided to show the effectiveness and capabilities of the proposed coverage algorithm.

Issue Section:
Select Articles
Topics:
Precision agriculture, Robots, Teams, Robotics, Modeling

References

1.
Barrientos
A.
,
Colorado
J.
,
Cerro
J.D.
,
Martinez
A.
,
Rossi
C.
,
Sanz
D.
, and
Valente
J.
,
“Aerial remote sensing in agriculture: A practical approach to area coverage and path planning for fleets of mini aerial robots,”
Journal of Field Robotics,
vol.
28
, no.
5
,
2011
, pp.
667
-
689
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
2.
Tokekar
P.
,
Hook
J.V.
,
Mulla
D.
, and
Isler
V.
,
“Sensor planning for a symbiotic UAV and UGV system for precision agriculture,”
IEEE Transactions on Robotics,
vol.
32
, no.
6
,
Dec 2016
, pp.
1498
-
1511
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
3.
Casady
W.W.
 and
Palm
H.L.
“Precision Agriculture: Remote Sensing and Ground Truthing,”
http://fs.fish.govt.nz/Page.aspx?pk=7&sc=SUR, mU Extension, University of Missouri-Columbia.
4.
Gonzalez-de Santos
P.
,
Ribeiro
A.
,
Fernandez-Quintanilla
C.
,
Lopez-Granados
F.
,
Brandstoetter
M.
,
Tomic
S.
,
Pedrazzi
S.
,
Peruzzi
A.
,
Pajares
G.
,
Kaplanis
G.
,
Perez-Ruiz
M.
,
Valero
C.
,
del Cerro
J.
,
Vieri
M.
,
Rabatel
G.
 and
Debilde
B.
,
“Fleets of robots for environmentally-safe pest control in agriculture,”
Precision Agriculture,
vol.
18
, no.
4
,
Aug 2017
, pp.
574
-
614
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
5.
Bhandari
S.
,
Raheja
A.
,
Green
R.L.
,
Do
D.
,
“Towards collaboration between unmanned aerial and ground vehicles for precision agriculture”,
Proc. SPIE 10218, Autonomous Air and Ground Sensing Systems for Agricultural Optimization and Phenotyping II,
2017
.
6.
Nolan
P.
,
Paley
D.A.
 and
Kroeger
K.
,
“Multi-UAS path planning for non-uniform data collection in precision agriculture,”
in
IEEE Aerospace Conference,
March 2017
, pp.
1
-
12
.
7.
Roldan
J.J.
,
Garcia-Aunon
P.
,
Garzon
M.
,
de Leon
J.
,
del Cerro
J.
 and
Barrientos
A.,
“Heterogeneous multirobot system for mapping environmental variables of greenhouses,”
Sensors,
vol.
16
, no.
7
,
2016
, pp.
1
-
24
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
8.
Cortes
J.
,
Martinez
S.
,
Karatas
T.
 and
Bullo
F.
,
“Coverage control for mobile sensing networks,”
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation,
vol.
20
, no.
2
,
April 2004
, pp.
243
-
255
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
9.
Yun
S.K.
, and
Rus
D.
,
“Distributed coverage with mobile robots on a graph: locational optimization and equal-mass partitioning,”
Robotica,
vol.
32
, no.
2
,
2014
, pp.
257
-
277
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
10.
Javanmard Alitappeh
R.
,
Pereira
G.A.S.
,
Aradjo
A.R.
 and
Pimenta
L.C.A.
,
“Multi-robot deployment using topological maps,”
Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems,
vol.
86
, no.
3
,
Jun 2017
, pp.
641
-
661
.
Google Scholar
Crossref
Search ADS
 
11.
Derenick
J.
,
Michael
N.
 and
Kumar
V.
,
“Energy-aware coverage control with docking for robot teams,”
in
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems,
Sept.
2011
, pp.
3667
-
3672
.
12.
Liu
L.
, and
Michael
N.
,
“Energy-aware aerial vehicle deployment via bipartite graph matching,”
in
2014 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS),
May 2014
, pp.
189
-
194
.
Copyright © 2018 by ASME
You do not currently have access to this content.