Automated and robotic ground-vehicle solutions are gradually becoming part of the agricultural industry, where they are used for performing tasks such as feeding, herding, planting, harvesting, and weed spraying. Agricultural machinery operates in both indoor and outdoor farm environments, resulting in changing operational conditions. Variation in the load transported by ground-vehicles is a common occurrence in the agricultural domain, in tasks such as animal feeding and field spraying. The development of automated and robotic ground-vehicle solutions for conditions and scenarios in the agricultural domain is a complex task, which requires input from multiple engineering disciplines. This PhD thesis proposes modelling and simulation for the research and development of automated and robotic ground-vehicle solutions for purposes such as component development, virtual prototype testing, and scenario evaluation. The collaboration of multiple engineering disciplines is achieved by combining multiple modelling and simulation tools from different engineering disciplines. These combined models are known as co-models and their execution is referred to as co-simulation. The results of this thesis are a model-based development methodology for automated and robotic ground-vehicles utilised for a number of research and development cases. The co-models of the automated and robotic ground vehicles were created using the model-based development methodology, and they contribute to the future development support in this research domain. The thesis presents four contributions toward the exploration of a chosen design space for an automated or robotic ground vehicle. Solutions obtained using co-modelling and co-simulation are deployed to their ground-vehicle realisations, which ensures that all stages of development are covered.
Washington State University（华盛顿州立大学）；United States Department of Agriculture（美国农业部）
Book chapter that summarizes recent research on agricultural robotics in orchard management, including Robotic pruning, Robotic thinning, Robotic spraying, Robotic harvesting, Robotic fruit transportation, and future trends.
Aarhus University（奥胡斯大学）；Aalborg University（奥尔堡大学）；Conpleks Innovation；University of Southern Denmark（南丹麦大学）
This paper describes a collaborative modelling approach to automated and robotic agricultural vehicle design. The Cresendo technology allows engineers from different disciplines to collaborate and produce system models. The combined models are called co-models and their execution co-simulation. To support future development efforts a template library of different vehicle and controllers types are provided. This paper describes a methodology to developing co-models from initial problem definition to deployment of the actual system. We illustrate the development methodology with an example devel…
University of Lincoln（林肯大学）；Saga Robotics（萨迦机器人公司）；Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
The agricultural domain offers a working environment where many human laborers are nowadays employed to maintain or harvest crops, with huge potential for productivity gains through the introduction of robotic automation. Detecting and localizing humans reliably and accurately in such an environment, however, is a prerequisite to many services offered by fleets of mobile robots collaborating with human workers. Consequently, in this paper, we expand on the concept of a topological particle filter (TPF) to accurately and individually localize and track workers in a farm environment, integrating…
Agri-Food is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK. It supports a food chain that generates over £108bn p.a., with 3.9m employees in a truly international industry and exports £20bn of UK manufactured goods. However, the global food chain is under pressure from population growth, climate change, political pressures affecting migration, population drift from rural to urban regions and the demographics of an aging global population. These challenges are recognised in the UK Industrial Strategy white paper and backed by significant investment via a Wave 2 Industrial Challenge Fund Investment…
University Hohenheim（霍恩海姆大学）；Koblenz-Landau University（科布伦茨-兰道大学）
A current problem in the design of small and lightweight autonomous agricultural robots is how to create sufficient traction on soil to pull an agricultural implement or load. One promising solution is offered by the interlock drive system, which penetrates spikes into the soil to create traction. The combination of soil penetrating spikes and a push-pull design offers new possibilities for vehicle control. By controlling the interlocking of the spikes and pushing and pulling them against the main frame, the vehicle can perform tight maneuvers. To validate this idea, we designed a robot, capab…
Agri-Sim: Agricultural Simulation Platform for Embodied Intelligence Evaluation in Greenhouse Robotics
School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University（上海大学机电工程与自动化学院）；Sino-European School of Technology of Shanghai University（上海大学中欧工程技术学院）；School of Future Technology (Institute of Artificial Intelligence), Shanghai University（上海大学未来技术学院（人工智能研究院））
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki（塞萨洛尼基亚里士多德大学）；Centre for Research and Technology Hellas（希腊研究与技术中心）
This paper presents a comprehensive review of ground agricultural robotic systems and applications with special focus on harvesting that span research and commercial products and results, as well as their enabling technologies. The majority of literature concerns the development of crop detection, field navigation via vision and their related challenges. Health monitoring, yield estimation, water status inspection, seed planting and weed removal are frequently encountered tasks. Regarding robotic harvesting, apples, strawberries, tomatoes and sweet peppers are mainly the crops considered in pu…
Lincoln Institute for Agri-food Technology, University of Lincoln（林肯大学林肯农业食品技术研究所）
Global food security is an issue that is fast becoming a critical matter in the world today. Global warming, climate change and a range of other impacts caused by humans, such as carbon emissions, sociopolitical and economical challenges (e.g. war), traditional workforce/labour decline and population growth are straining global food security. The need for high-speed and reliable wireless communication in agriculture is becoming more of a necessity rather than a technological demonstration or showing superiority in the field. Governments and industries around the world are seeing more urgency i…
The self-localization capability is a crucial component for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) in farming applications. Approaches based solely on visual cues or on low-cost GPS are easily prone to fail in such scenarios. In this paper, we present a robust and accurate 3D global pose estimation framework, designed to take full advantage of heterogeneous sensory data. By modeling the pose estimation problem as a pose graph optimization, our approach simultaneously mitigates the cumulative drift introduced by motion estimation systems (wheel odometry, visual odometry, ...), and the noise introduced …
University of Salento（萨伦托大学）；CNR-ISSIA（意大利国家研究委员会智能系统研究所）；IRSTEA（法国国家农业与环境研究院）；Danish Technological Institute（丹麦技术研究所）；Fraunhofer IAIS（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）；CLAAS Agrosystems GmbH（CLAAS农业系统有限公司）
In the last few years, robotic technology has been increasingly employed in agriculture to develop intelligent vehicles that can improve productivity and competitiveness. Accurate and robust environmental perception is a critical requirement to address unsolved issues including safe interaction with field workers and animals, obstacle detection in controlled traffic applications, crop row guidance, surveying for variable rate applications, and situation awareness, in general, towards increased process automation. Given the variety of conditions thatmay be encountered in the field, no single se…
National University of Sciences and Technology（巴基斯坦国立科技大学）
Robots have revolutionized our way of life in recent years.One of the domains that has not yet completely benefited from the robotic automation is the agricultural sector. Agricultural Robotics should complement humans in the arduous tasks during different sub-domains of this sector. Extensive research in Agricultural Robotics has been carried out in Japan, USA, Australia and Germany focusing mainly on the heavy agricultural machinery. Pakistan is an agricultural rich country and its economy and food security are closely tied with agriculture in general and wheat in particular. However, agricu…
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）；La Sapienza University of Rome（罗马第一大学）
Agricultural robots have the prospect to enable more efficient and sustainable agricultural production of food, feed, and fiber. Perception of crops and weeds is a central component of agricultural robots that aim to monitor fields and assess the plants as well as their growth stage in an automatic manner. Semantic perception mostly relies on deep learning using supervised approaches, which require time and qualified workers to label fairly large amounts of data. In this paper, we look into the problem of reducing the amount of labels without compromising the final segmentation performance. Fo…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore（圣心天主教大学）
In recent years Sim2Real approaches have brought great results to robotics. Techniques such as model-based learning or domain randomization can help overcome the gap between simulation and reality, but in some situations simulation accuracy is still needed. An example is agricultural robotics, which needs detailed simulations, both in terms of dynamics and visuals. However, simulation software is still not capable of such quality and accuracy. Current Sim2Real techniques are helpful in mitigating the problem, but for these specific tasks they are not enough.
Ecole des Mines de Nantes（南特矿业学校）；Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique（法国国家科学研究中心）；University of Nantes（南特大学）
The paper deals with the modeling and identification of the gravity compensators used in heavy industrial robots. The main attention is paid to the geometrical parameters identification and calibration accuracy. To reduce impact of the measurement errors, the design of calibration experiments is used. The advantages of the developed technique are illustrated by experimental results
VinePT-Map: Pole-Trunk Semantic Mapping for Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Vineyards
Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino（电子与电信系，托斯纳大学）；PoliTO Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics (PIC4SeR)（PoliTO 服务机器人跨部门中心（PIC4SeR））
PhenoBench -- A Large Dataset and Benchmarks for Semantic Image Interpretation in the Agricultural Domain
Center for Robotics, University of Bonn（波恩大学机器人中心）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究院）
KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；Chalmers University of Technology（查尔姆斯理工大学）
Data-driven approaches for modelling contact-rich tasks address many of the difficulties that analytical models bear. For real-world scenarios, the hardware capabilities constrain the available measurements and consequently, every step of the problem's formulation. In this work, we propose a formulation that encapsulates knowledge from a baseline controller for the contact-rich task of food-cutting. Based on this formulation, we employ deep networks to model the dynamics within a model predictive controller. We design a training process based on curriculum training with learning rate decay for…
A Verification Methodology for Safety Assurance of Robotic Autonomous Systems
Faculty of Science and Technology, Norwegian University Of Life Sciences (NMBU)（科学与技术学院，挪威生命科学大学）；Department of Mechatronics, University of Agder (UiA)（机械电子系，阿格德大学）；Department of Computer Science, University Of York, UK（计算机科学系，约克大学（英国））
MoleMOD is a heterogeneous self-reconfigurable modular robotic system to be employed in architecture and civil engineering. In this paper we present two components of the MoleMOD infrastructure - a test environment and a planning algorithm. The test environment for simulation and visualization of active parts as well as passive blocks of MoleMOD is based on Gazebo - a powerful general-purpose robotic simulator. The key effort has been put into preparation of realistic models of passive and active components taking into account their physical characteristics. Moreover, given a starting configur…
Software verification is an important tool in establishing the reliability of critical systems. One potential area of application is in the field of robotics, as robots take on more tasks in both day-to-day areas and highly specialised domains. Robots are usually given a plan to follow, if there are errors in this plan the robot will not perform reliably. The capability to check plans for errors in advance could prevent this. Python is a popular programming language in the robotics domain, through the use of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and various other libraries. Python's Turtle package …
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour（唐德斯大脑、认知与行为研究所）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）；Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）；Ghent University（根特大学）；imec（微电子研究中心）；Instituto Superio Técnico（高等技术学院）；University of Lisbon（里斯本大学）
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot interventions. However, children's development involve complex faculties such as exploration, creativity and curiosity which are challenging to model. Also, often children express themselves in a playful way which is different from a typical adult behaviour. Different children also have different needs, and it remains a challenge in the current state of the art t…
Norwegian University of Life Sciences（挪威生命科学大学）；Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro（里约热内卢天主教大学）
In recent years, the use of robots in agriculture has been increasing mainly due to the high demand of productivity, precision and efficiency, which follow the climate change effects and world population growth. Unlike conventional agriculture, sugarcane farms are usually regions with dense vegetation, gigantic areas, and subjected to extreme weather conditions, such as intense heat, moisture and rain. TIBA - Tankette for Intelligent BioEnergy Agriculture - is the first result of an R&D project which strives to develop an autonomous mobile robotic system for carrying out a number of agricultur…
3D Branch Point Cloud Completion for Robotic Pruning in Apple Orchards
School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University（康奈尔大学电气与计算机工程学院）；Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University（康奈尔大学西布利机械与航空航天工程学院）；College of Arts&Sciences, Cornell University（康奈尔大学文理学院）；School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell University（康奈尔大学整合植物科学学院）
Developing Flying Explorer for Autonomous Digital Modelling in Wild Unknowns
College of Civil Aviation, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics（南京航空航天大学民航学院）；College of Engineering, South China Agriculture University（华南农业大学工程学院）
