Multi-robot Systems for Precision Agriculture

This chapter addresses the integration of autonomous aerial inspection with autonomous ground intervention to perform agricultural tasks, specifically, precision treatments. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may be used to inspect terrain and assess affected areas because of their suitability to access and cover large areas easily. Then, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) may use this information to perform crop treatments more efficiently and precisely. An overall system to manage these combined missions, comprising aerial inspections and ground interventions performed by a team of autonomous robots (multi robot system), was designed and implemented. Thus, two aerial robots were used to inspect the field autonomously, taking sets of images that were then processed to produce weed maps. From these weed maps plans were obtained for three autonomous ground robots that were coordinated to perform the treatments of the entire arable field. This chapter describes the coordination, planning and supervision or monitoring mechanisms implemented, as well as other interesting characteristics of the autonomous robot team.