Abstract
This paper describes the development of small low-cost cooperative robots for sustainable broad-acre agriculture to increase broad-acre crop production and reduce environmental impact. The current focus of the project is to use robotics to deal with resistant weeds, a critical problem for Australian farmers. To keep the overall system affordable our robot uses low-cost cameras and positioning sensors to perform a large scale coverage task while also avoiding obstacles. A multi-robot coordinator assigns parts of a given field to individual robots. The paper describes the modification of an electric vehicle for autonomy and experimental results from one real robot and twelve simulated robots working in coordination for approximately two hours on a 55 hectare field in Emerald Australia. Over this time the real robot ‘sprayed’ 6 hectares missing 2.6% and overlapping 9.7% within its assigned field partition, and successfully avoided three obstacles.
This work was supported in part by the Australian Research Council Linkage Project LP110200375 “Robotics for Zero-Tillage Agriculture” awarded to QUT, SwarmFarm Robotics and The University of Sydney.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Sinden, J., Jones, R., Hester, S., et al.: The economic impact of weeds in Australia. CRC for Australian Weed Management (2004)
Taylor, J.: Benefits of permanent traffic lanes in a controlled traffic crop production system. Soil and Tillage Research 3, 385–395 (1983)
Bell, T.: Automatic tractor guidance using carrier-phase differential GPS. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 25, 53–66 (2000)
Reid, J.F., Searcy, S.W.: Vision-based guidance of an agricultural tractor. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 39–43 (1987)
Billingsley, J., Schoenfisch, M.: The successful development of a vision guidance system for agriculture. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 16, 147–163 (1997)
Ollis, M., Stentz, A.: Vision-based perception for an automated harvester. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robot and Systems, pp. 1838–1844 (1997)
Pilarski, T., Happold, M., Pangels, H., et al.: The demeter system for automated harvesting. Autonomous Robots 13, 9–20 (2002)
Stentz, A., Dima, C., Wellington, C., et al.: A System for Semi-Autonomous Tractor Operations. Autonomous Robots 13, 87–104 (2002)
Amidi, O.: Integrated mobile robot control. Carnegie Mellon University (1990)
Torii, T.: Research in autonomous agriculture vehicles in Japan. Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 25, 133–153 (2000)
Johnson, D.A., Naffin, D.J., Puhalla, J.S., et al.: Development and implementation of a team of robotic tractors for autonomous peat moss harvesting. Journal of Field Robotics 26, 549–571 (2009)
Moorehead, S.J., Wellington, C.K., Gilmore, B.J., Vallespi, C.: Automating orchards: A system of autonomous tractors for orchard maintenance. In: Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robot and Systems (2012)
Bakker, T., Asselt van, K., Bontsema, J., et al.: Systematic design of an autonomous platform for robotic weeding. Journal of Terramechanics 47, 63–73 (2010)
Ruckelshausen, A., Biber, P., Dorna, M., et al.: BoniRob: an autonomous field robot platform for individual plant phenotyping. Precision Agriculture 9, 841 (2009)
Jorgensen, R.N., Sorensen, C.G., Maagaard, J., et al.: HortiBot: A System Design of a Robotic Tool Carrier for High-tech Plant Nursing. Agricultural Engineering International 9 (2007)
Jensen, K., Nielsen, S.H., Joergensen, R.N., et al.: A low cost, modular robotics tool carrier for precision agriculture research. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Precision Agriculture (2012)
Choset, H.: Coverage for robotics–A survey of recent results. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence 31, 113–126 (2001)
Oksanen, T., Visala, A.: Coverage path planning algorithms for agricultural field machines. Journal of Field Robotics 26, 651–668 (2009)
Jin, J., Tang, L.: Coverage path planning on three-dimensional terrain for arable farming. Journal of Field Robotics 28, 424–440 (2011)
Hameed, I.A.: Intelligent coverage path planning for agricultural robots and autonomous machines on three-dimensional terrain. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 1–19 (2013)
Quigley, M., Gerkey, B., Conley, K., et al.: ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System. In: International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2009)
Choset, H., Lynch, K.M., Hutchinson, S., et al.: Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations. MIT Press, Cambridge (2005)
Oksanen, T., Visala, A.: Coverage path planning algorithms for agricultural field machines. Journal of Field Robotics 26, 651–668 (2009)
Takasu, T., Yasuda, A.: Development of the low-cost RTK-GPS receiver with an open source program package RTKLIB. In: International Symposium on GPS/GNSS (2009)
Parzen, E.: On estimation of a probability density function and mode. The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33, 1065–1076 (1962)
Geiger, A., Roser, M., Urtasun, R.: Efficient Large-Scale Stereo Matching. In: Kimmel, R., Klette, R., Sugimoto, A. (eds.) ACCV 2010, Part I. LNCS, vol. 6492, pp. 25–38. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Cohen, B.J., Chitta, S., Likhachev, M.: Search-based planning for manipulation with motion primitives. In: 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, pp. 2902–2908. IEEE (2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ball, D. et al. (2015). Robotics for Sustainable Broad-Acre Agriculture. In: Mejias, L., Corke, P., Roberts, J. (eds) Field and Service Robotics. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 105. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07488-7_30
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07488-7_30
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-07487-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-07488-7
eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)