Monitoring and mapping with robot swarms for agricultural applications

• Published in: 2017 14th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Video and Signal Based Surveillance (AVSS) pp. 1 - 6
• Main Authors: Albani, Dario, Ijsselmuiden, Joris, Haken, Ramon, Trianni, Vito
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.08.2017
• Subjects: Agriculture; Drones; Hardware; Monitoring; Robot sensing systems; Robustness
• DOI: 10.1109/AVSS.2017.8078478

Robotics is expected to play a major role in the agricultural domain, and often multi-robot systems and collaborative approaches are mentioned as potential solutions to improve efficiency and system robustness. Among the multi-robot approaches, swarm robotics stresses aspects like flexibility, scalability and robustness in solving complex tasks, and is considered very relevant for precision farming and large-scale agricultural applications. However, swarm robotics research is still confined into the lab, and no application in the field is currently available. In this paper, we describe a roadmap to bring swarm robotics to the field within the domain of weed control problems. This roadmap is implemented within the experiment SAGA, founded within the context of the ECORD++ EU Project. Together with the experiment concept, we introduce baseline results for the target scenario of monitoring and mapping weed in a field by means of a swarm of UAVs.