Abstract
Climate change, limited natural resources, and the increase in the world’s population impose society to produce food more sustainably, with lower energy and water consumption. The use of robots in agriculture is one of the most promising solutions to change the paradigm of agricultural practices. Agricultural robots should be seen as a way to make jobs easier and lighter, and also a way for people who do not have agricultural skills to produce their food. The PixelCropRobot is a low-cost, open-source robot that can perform the processes of monitoring and watering plants in small gardens. This work proposes a mission supervisor for PixelCropRobot, and general agricultural robots, and presents a prototype of user interface to this mission supervision. The communication between the mission supervisor and the other components of the system is done using ROS2 and MQTT, and mission file standardized. The mission supervisor receives a prescription map, with information about the respective mission, and decomposes them into simple tasks. An A* algorithm then defines the priority of each mission that depends on factors like water requirements, and distance travelled. This concept of mission supervisor was deployed into the PixelCropRobot and was validated in real conditions, showing a enormous potential to be extended to other agricultural robots.
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Notes
- 1.
https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth accessed on 27/06/2023.
- 2.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/water-in-agriculture accessed on 27/06/2023.
- 3.
https://www.fao.org/3/CA1553EN/ca1553en.pdf accessed on 27/06/2023.
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https://grantham.sheffield.ac.uk/soil-loss-an-unfolding-global-disaster/ accessed on 27/06/2023.
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https://farm.bot/ accessed on 27/06/2023.
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https://www.qorvo.com/products/p/DWM1001-DEV accessed on 09/07/2023.
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https://www.gimp.org accessed on 28/06/2023.
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https://youtu.be/hcP5Z6hn2Lg?si=vLfveGyIj-TgWdzF accessed on 11/10/2023.
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Acknowledgements
This work has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No 101000554 and No 101004085. The sole responsibility for the content on this work lies with the authors. It does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the European Research Executive Agency (REA) or the European Commission (EC). The REA or the EC are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
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Moreira, T., N. Santos, F., Santos, L., Sarmento, J., Terra, F., Sousa, A. (2024). Mission Supervisor for Food Factories Robots. In: Marques, L., Santos, C., Lima, J.L., Tardioli, D., Ferre, M. (eds) Robot 2023: Sixth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2023. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 978. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-59167-9_33
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