Building a distributed robot garden

Correll, Nikolaus; Aréchiga, Nikos; Bolger, Adrienne; Bollini, Mario A.; Charrow, Ben; Clayton, Adam; Dominguez, Felipe; Donahue, Kenneth; Dyar, Samuel; Johnson, Luke B.; Liu, Huan; Patrikalakis, Alexander; Robertson, Timothy; Smith, Jeremy S.; Soltero, Daniel E.; Tanner, Melissa M.; White, Lauren; Rus, Daniela

doi:10.1109/iros.2009.5354261

Cited by 47 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…We also plan to use plants as sensors (phyto-sensing) but a key ingredient are robots and the formation of physical structures. A bit closer to our ideas is the concept of a distributed robot garden [Correll et al, 2009] although that is still driven by the main idea of automation. Instead, our motivation in flora robotica is not to automate gardening but to develop a bio-hybrid system that assigns equal roles to plants and robots and creates synergies between them; see the circle of feedbacks on the left-hand side of Fig.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Flora Robotica - Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Hamann

Wahby

Schmickl

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence

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Besides the life-as-it-could-be driver of artificial life research there is also the concept of extending natural life by creating hybrids or mixed societies that are built from both natural and artificial components. In this paper, we motivate and present the research program of the project flora robotica. We present our concepts of control, hardware design, modeling, and human interaction along with preliminary experiments. Our objective is to develop and to investigate closely linked symbiotic relationships between robots and natural plants and to explore the potentials of a plant-robot society able to produce architectural artifacts and living spaces. These robot-plant bio-hybrids create synergies that allow for new functions of plants and robots. They also create novel design opportunities for an architecture that fuses the design and construction phase. The bio-hybrid is an example of mixed societies between 'hard artificial and 'wet natural life, which enables an interaction between natural and artificial ecologies. They form an embodied, selforganizing, and distributed cognitive system which is supposed to grow and develop over long periods of time resulting in the creation of meaningful architectural structures. A key idea is to assign equal roles to robots and plants in order to create a highly integrated, symbiotic system. Besides the gain of knowledge, this project has the objective to create a bio-hybrid system with a defined function and application -growing architectural artifacts.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Flora Robotica - Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Hamann

Wahby

Schmickl

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence

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“…Bush trimming fits into the research trend of precision agriculture . In the last years multiple research works investigated the topics of automated fruit harvesting (Bac, van Henten, Hemming, & Edan, ; Correll et al, ; van Henten, Hemming, van Tuijl, Kornet, & Bontsema, ), tree pruning (Paulin, Botterill, Lin, Chen, & Green, ), precision orchard farming (Gasparri, Ulivi, Bono Rossello, & Garone, ), flower pollination (Ohi et al, ), and vineyard maintenance (Grape, ). Analogously to other precision agriculture tasks, the automation of bush trimming has to deal with an unstructured and dynamic environment, which requires advanced sensor capabilities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Coverage trajectory planning for a bush trimming robot arm

Kaljaca

Vroegindeweij

Henten

2019

Journal of Field Robotics

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A novel motion planning algorithm for robotic bush trimming is presented. The algorithm is based on an optimal route search over a graph. Differently from other works in robotic surface coverage, it entails both accuracy in the surface sweeping task and smoothness in the motion of the robot arm. The proposed method requires the selection of a custom objective function in the joint space for optimal node traversal scheduling, as well as a kinematically constrained time interpolation. The algorithm was tested in simulation using a model of the Jaco arm and three target bush shapes. Analysis of the simulated motions showed how, differently from classical coverage techniques, the proposed algorithm is able to ensure high tool positioning accuracy while avoiding excessive arm motion jerkiness. It was reported that forbidding manipulation posture changes during the cutting phase of the motion is a key element for task accuracy, leading to a decrease of the tool positioning error up to 90%. Furthermore, the algorithm was validated in a real‐world trimming scenario with boxwood bushes. A target of 20 mm accuracy was proposed for a trimming result to be considered successful. Results showed that on average 82% of the bush surface was affected by trimming, and 51% of the trimmed surface was cut within the desired level of accuracy. Despite the fact that the trimming accuracy turned out to be lower than the stated requirements, it was found out this was mainly a consequence of the inaccurate, early stage vision system employed to compute the target trimming surface. By contrast, the trimming motion planning algorithm generated trajectories that smoothly followed their input target and allowed effective branch cutting.

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“…In contrast to the robot garden in [11], not only are there robots amongst the plants in the garden, but the plants themselves are robotic devices. This is similar to the artistic sculpture "Electronic Garden #2" described in [1] and the interactive display of [12].…”

Section: Robot Garden Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Distributed Robot Garden System

Sanneman

Ajilo

DelPreto

et al. 2015

2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

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Abstract-Computational thinking is an important part of a modern education, and robotics provides a powerful tool for teaching programming logic in an interactive and engaging way. The robot garden presented in this paper is a distributed multirobot system capable of running autonomously or under user control from a simple graphical interface. Over 100 origami flowers are actuated with LEDs and printed pouch motors, and are deployed in a modular array around additional swimming and crawling folded robots. The garden integrates state-of-theart rapid design and fabrication technologies with distributed systems software techniques to create a scalable swarm in which robots can be controlled individually or as a group. The garden can be used to teach basic algorithmic concepts through its distributed algorithm demonstration capabilities and can teach programming concepts through its educationoriented user interface.

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Building a distributed robot garden

Cited by 47 publications

References 11 publications

Flora Robotica - Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Flora Robotica - Mixed Societies of Symbiotic Robot-Plant Bio-Hybrids

Coverage trajectory planning for a bush trimming robot arm

A Distributed Robot Garden System

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