Multi Robot Cooperative Area Coverage, Case Study: Spraying
Area coverage is a well-known problem in multi robotic systems, and it is a typical requirement in various real-world applications. A common and popular approach in the robotic community is to use explicit forms of communication for task allocation and co
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stract. Area coverage is a well-known problem in multi robotic systems, and it is a typical requirement in various real-world applications. A common and popular approach in the robotic community is to use explicit forms of communication for task allocation and coordination. These approaches are susceptible to the loss of communication signal, and costly with high computational complexity. There are very few approaches which are focused on implicit forms of communication. In these approaches, robots rely only on their local information for task allocation and coordination. In this paper, a cooperative strategy is proposed by which a team of robots perform spraying a large field. The focus of this paper is to achieve task allocation and coordination using only the robots’ local information.
Keywords: Multi robotic system tive area coverage
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Cooperative behaviour
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Coopera-
Introduction
In area coverage, a team of robots is cooperatively trying sweep an entire area, possibly containing obstacles. The goal is to achieve coverage with efficient paths for each robot which jointly ensure that every single point in the environment is visited by at least one of the robots while performing the task [6]. Many real world applications require systematic area coverage including search in forested areas, demining, distribution of beacons and line searching. In this paper we focus on application of agricultural robotics. Recently, there has been an increase of interest in performing agricultural tasks by a team of autonomous robots. One of the main reasons is shortage of labor force. Over the years, various approaches have been suggested to reduce the need of labour force. A conventional approach is to use larger machineries to process larger portions of the field at a time. However, deploying heavy and large machineries results in soil compaction [14]. Soil compaction has devastating outcomes on the crop, and it costs up to 90 % of the cultivation cost to recover [2]. Another trend in reducing input labour force is automation. However, single robotic approaches are expensive, and still require occasional human supervision [12]. Deploying a team of smaller and lighter agricultural machineries prevents c Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 L. Alboul et al. (Eds.): TAROS 2016, LNAI 9716, pp. 165–176, 2016. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40379-3 17
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soil compaction, reduces the cost of cultivation, and increases the fault-tolerance of the overall system [11]. Furthermore, multi robotic approach has the promise to reduce dependency on labour force [12]. If a team of robots is applied, the main question is how the robots should execute the task to cooperatively achieve the global goal? To answer this question, the task of spraying has to be studied in detail. 1.1
Spraying
Spraying is the process of dispensing Plant Protection Products (PPP) on the crop at different stages during cultivation. Conventionally, a tractor with spraying unit is driven throughout the field and the PPPs are gradually dispe
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