A Cloud-Assisted Region Monitoring Strategy of Mobile Robot in Smart Greenhouse

Abstract

In smart agricultural systems, the macroinformation sensing by adopting a mobile robot with multiple types of sensors is a key step for sustainable development of agriculture. Also, in a region monitoring strategy that meets the real-scene requirements, optimal operation of mobile robots is necessary. In this paper, a cloud-assisted region monitoring strategy of mobile robots in a smart greenhouse is presented. First, a hybrid framework that contains a cloud, a wireless network, and mobile multisensor robots is deployed to monitor a wide-region greenhouse. Then, a novel strategy that contains two phases is designed to ensure valid region monitoring and meet the time constraints of a mobile sensing robot. In the first phase, candidate region monitoring points are selected using the improved virtual forces. In the second phase, a moving path for the mobile node is calculated based on Euclidean distance. Subsequently, the applicability of the proposed strategy is verified by the greenhouse test system. The verification results show that the proposed algorithm has better performance than the conventional methods. The results also demonstrate that, by applying the proposed algorithm, the number of monitoring points and time consumption can reduce, while the valid monitoring region area is enlarged.

A Comprehensive Survey on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem: Applications, Approaches and Taxonomy

“…farmer needs to provide an optimized path for each robot to reduce costs and improve production. Both ground vehicles and UAVs are of great help to farmers [27,28,29]. The authors in [29], proposed a cloud-based architecture composed of a WSN, mobile robots, and Cloud system to monitor a greenhouse region.…”

A Comprehensive Survey on the Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem: Applications, Approaches and Taxonomy

“…The final version of this paper is published in Computer Science Review, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosrev.2021.100369 farmer needs to provide an optimized path for each robot to reduce costs and improve production. Both ground vehicles and UAVs are of great help to farmers [27,28,29]. The authors in [29], proposed a cloud-based architecture composed of a WSN, mobile robots, and Cloud system to monitor a greenhouse region.…”

“…Both ground vehicles and UAVs are of great help to farmers [27,28,29]. The authors in [29], proposed a cloud-based architecture composed of a WSN, mobile robots, and Cloud system to monitor a greenhouse region. The authors first generate candidate region monitoring points to be visited by mobile robots.…”

Internet of Robotic Things in Smart Domains: Applications and Challenges

“…IoRT-based smart agriculture systems are designed to perform various agricultural activities, such as moisture sensing, irrigation, crop monitoring and defence against pests and harmful animals [ 96 ]. To this purpose, mobile robots with integrated Global Positioning System (GPS), such as areal and ground vehicles [ 79 , 81 ], are used to collect data from the field [ 97 , 98 ]. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often used along with a set of IoT devices, to gather information from such sensors, overflying the territory [ 99 ].…”