Precision agriculture is the collection of hardware and software technologies that allow a farmer to make informed, differentiated decisions regarding agricultural operations such as planting, fertilizing, pest control, and harvesting. In recent years, advances in agricultural machinery and the emergence of agricultural robots continuously increased the resolution at which differentiated treatment is possible. This creates a corresponding need for information at a fine spatial and temporal resolution. Autonomous multi-robot systems (e.g., unmanned ground and aerial vehicles) are some of the most promising approaches for such information collection in open-air farms. In this paper, we survey the current state and challenges of multi-robot information gathering for precision agriculture, with a special focus on maximizing information and ensuring the security of the collected data while simultaneously keeping energy consumption in check.
We consider the NP-hard problem of multirobot informative path planning in the presence of communication constraints, where the objective is to collect higher amounts of information of an ambient phenomenon. We propose a novel approach that uses continuous region partitioning into Voronoi components to efficiently divide an initially unknown environment among the robots based on newly discovered obstacles enabling improved load balancing between robots. Simulation results show that our proposed approach is successful in reducing the initial imbalance of the robots’ allocated free regions while ensuring close-to-reality spatial modeling within a reasonable amount of time.
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