We present a self-supervised approach for learning to predict traversable paths for wheeled mobile robots that require good traction to navigate. Our algorithm, termed WayFAST (Waypoint Free Autonomous Systems for Traversability), uses RGB and depth data, along with navigation experience, to autonomously generate traversable paths in outdoor unstructured environments.Our key inspiration is that traction can be estimated for rolling robots using kinodynamic models. Using traction estimates provided by an online receding horizon estimator, we are able to train a traversability prediction neural network in a self-supervised manner, without requiring heuristics utilized by previous methods. We demonstrate the effectiveness of WayFAST through extensive field testing in varying environments, ranging from sandy dry beaches to forest canopies and snow covered grass fields. Our results clearly demonstrate that WayFAST can learn to avoid geometric obstacles as well as untraversable terrain, such as snow, which would be difficult to avoid with sensors that provide only geometric data, such as LiDAR. Furthermore, we show that our training pipeline based on online traction estimates is more data-efficient than other heuristic-based methods.
This paper describes a system for visually guided autonomous navigation of under-canopy farm robots. Low-cost under-canopy robots can drive between crop rows under the plant canopy and accomplish tasks that are infeasible for overthe-canopy drones or larger agricultural equipment. However, autonomously navigating them under the canopy presents a number of challenges: unreliable GPS and LiDAR, high cost of sensing, challenging farm terrain, clutter due to leaves and weeds, and large variability in appearance over the season and across crop types. We address these challenges by building a modular system that leverages machine learning for robust and generalizable perception from monocular RGB images from low-cost cameras, and model predictive control for accurate control in challenging terrain. Our system, CropFollow, is able to autonomously drive 485 meters per intervention on average, outperforming a state-of-the-art LiDAR based system (286 meters per intervention) in extensive field testing spanning over 25 km. I. INTRODUCTIONThis paper describes the design of a visually-guided navigation system for compact, low-cost, under-canopy agricultural robots for commodity row-crops (corn, soybean, sugarcane etc), such as that shown in Figure 1. Our system, called CropFollow, uses monocular RGB images from an on-board front-facing camera to steer the robot to autonomously traverse in between crop rows in harsh, visually cluttered, uneven, and variable real-world agricultural fields. Robust and reliable autonomous navigation of such under-canopy robots has the potential to enable a number of practical and scientific applications: High-throughput plant phenotyping [43,37,68,66,58,25], ultra-precise pesticide treatments, mechanical weeding [41], plant manipulation [17,61], and cover crop planting [64,62] Such applications are not possible with overcanopy larger tractors and UAVs, and are crucial for increasing agricultural sustainability [55,22].Autonomous row-following is a foundational capability for robots that need to navigate between crop rows in agricultural fields. Such robots cannot rely on RTK (Real-Time Kinematic)-GPS [21] based methods which are used for overthe-canopy autonomy (e.g. for drones, tractors, and combine Project website with data and videos: https://ansivakumar.github.io/ learned-visual-navigation/. Correspondence to {av7,girishc}@illinois.edu. * Girish Chowdhary and Saurabh Gupta contributed equally and are listed alphabetically.
The timing of flowering plays a critical role in determining the productivity of agricultural crops. If the crops flower too early, the crop would mature before the end of the growing season, losing the opportunity to capture and use large amounts of light energy. If the crops flower too late, the crop may be killed by the change of seasons before it is ready to harvest. Maize flowering is one of the most important periods where even small amounts of stress can significantly alter yield. In this work, we developed and compared two methods for automatic tassel detection based on the imagery collected from an unmanned aerial vehicle, using deep learning models. The first approach was a customized framework for tassel detection based on convolutional neural network (TD-CNN). The other method was a state-of-the-art object detection technique of the faster region-based CNN (Faster R-CNN), serving as baseline detection accuracy. The evaluation criteria for tassel detection were customized to correctly reflect the needs of tassel detection in an agricultural setting. Although detecting thin tassels in the aerial imagery is challenging, our results showed promising accuracy: the TD-CNN had an F1 score of 95.9% and the Faster R-CNN had 97.9% F1 score. More CNN-based model structures can be investigated in the future for improved accuracy, speed, and generalizability on aerial-based tassel detection.
Despite the rapid advancement of navigation algorithms, mobile robots often produce anomalous behaviors that can lead to navigation failures. The ability to detect such anomalous behaviors is a key component in modern robots to achieve high-levels of autonomy. Reactive anomaly detection methods identify anomalous task executions based on the current robot state and thus lack the ability to alert the robot before an actual failure occurs. Such an alert delay is undesirable due to the potential damage to both the robot and the surrounding objects. We propose a proactive anomaly detection network (PAAD) for robot navigation in unstructured and uncertain environments. PAAD predicts the probability of future failure based on the planned motions from the predictive controller and the current observation from the perception module. Multi-sensor signals are fused effectively to provide robust anomaly detection in the presence of sensor occlusion as seen in field environments. Our experiments on field robot data demonstrates superior failure identification performance than previous methods, and that our model can capture anomalous behaviors in real-time while maintaining a low false detection rate in cluttered fields.Code is available at https://github.com/tianchenji/PAAD.
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