Abstract
For mobile robots to be effectively applied to real world unstructured environments—such as large scale farming—they require the ability to generate adaptive plans that account both for limited onboard resources, and the presence of dynamic changes, including nearby moving individuals. This work provides a real world empirical evaluation of our proposed hierarchical framework for long-term autonomy of field robots, conducted on University of Sydney’s Swagbot agricultural robot platform. We demonstrate the ability of the framework to navigate an unstructured and dynamic environment in an effective manner, validating its use for long-term deployment in large scale farming, for tasks such as autonomous weeding in the presence of moving individuals.
S. Eiffert and N.D. Wallace—Contributed equally to this work.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bechar, A., Vigneault, C.: Agricultural robots for field operations. Part 2: operations and systems. Biosyst. Eng. 153, 110–128 (2017)
Carpio, R.F., et al.: A navigation architecture for Ackermann vehicles in precision farming. IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. 5(2), 1103–1110 (2020)
Trautman, P., Krause, A.: Unfreezing the robot: navigation in dense, interacting crowds. In: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 797–803 (2010)
Eiffert, S., Wallace, N., Kong, H., Pirmarzdashti, N., Sukkarieh, S.: A hierarchical framework for long-term and robust deployment of field ground robots in large-Scale farming. In: Proceedings of IEEE CASE, pp. 948–954, Hong Kong (2020)
Van Den Berg, J., Guy, S.J., Lin, M., Manocha, D.: Reciprocal n-body collision avoidance. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium ISRR. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol. 70, pp. 3–19 (2011)
Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S.: Receding horizon estimation and control with structured noise blocking for mobile robot slip compensation. In: Proceedings of IEEE ICRA, pp. 1169–1175, Montreal, Canada (2019)
Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S.: Structured noise blocking strategies for receding horizon estimation and control of mobile robots with slip. In: Proceedings of Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA), pp. 1–10 (2018)
Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S.: Experimental validation of structured receding horizon estimation and control for mobile ground robot slip Compensation. In: Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Field and Service Robotics, pp. 1–16 (2019)
Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S.: Motion cost characterisation of an omnidirectional WMR on uneven terrains. In: Proceedings of the 12th IFAC CAMS and 1st IFAC WROCO, vol. 52, No. 22, pp. 31–36, Daejeon, Korea (2019)
Wallace, N., Kong, H., Hill, A., Sukkarieh, S.: The orienteering problem with replenishment. In: Proceedings of the IEEE CASE, pp. 973–978, Hong Kong (2020)
Eiffert, S., Kong, H., Pirmarzdashti, N., Sukkarieh, S.: Path planning in dynamic environments using Generative RNNs and Monte Carlo tree search. In: Proceedings of IEEE ICRA, pp. 10263–10269, Paris, France (2020)
Eiffert, S., Sukkarieh, S.: Predicting responses to a robot’s future motion using generative recurrent neural networks. In: Proceedings of Australasian Conference on Robotics and Automation (ACRA) (2019)
Varandas, L., Gaspar, P., Aguiar, M.: Standalone docking station with combined charging methods for agricultural mobile robots, world academy of science, engineering and technology, open science index 145. Int. J. Mech. Mechatron. Eng. 13(1), 38–42 (2019)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Eiffert, S., Wallace, N.D., Kong, H., Pirmarzdashti, N., Sukkarieh, S. (2021). Experimental Evaluation of a Hierarchical Operating Framework for Ground Robots in Agriculture. In: Siciliano, B., Laschi, C., Khatib, O. (eds) Experimental Robotics. ISER 2020. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 19. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71151-1_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71151-1_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-71150-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-71151-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)