Energy Aware Mission Planning for WMRs on Uneven Terrains

Advances in Agriculture Robotics: A State-of-the-Art Review and Challenges Ahead

“…Like the RIPPA and Ladybird robots, the Swagbot robot (seen in Figure 6s) was developed by Australian researchers from ACFR. The robot was built for general purposes, to perform activities such as autonomous weed identification and spraying, soil and pasture analysis, biomass estimation and livestock monitoring [55]. The objective of developing robots with a wide variety of applications is to be able to establish a process of standardization and modularization of robotic systems.…”

A Hierarchical Framework for Long-term and Robust Deployment of Field Ground Robots in Large-Scale Farming

“…The development of energy-aware and efficient path planning methods has also received significant interest in recent years, utilising cost models for fuel and energy use for point-to-point and coverage path planning [17]- [20] and planning energy efficient multi-stage paths for WMRs in undulating off-road environments [6]. The problem of achieving longer term autonomy under resource constraints is often modelled as variants of the Orienteering Problem (OP) across numerous domains [21]- [22] with recent literature exploring approaches which allow for recharging of resources [23]- [24].…”

“…Our approach combines a long term mission planner with a local dynamic path planner to achieve long term autonomy of a robot travelling between updated objective waypoints in the presence of both static obstacles and dynamic agents. This framework: (1) utilises our prior work in energy efficient path planning [5]- [6] for generating long term plans; (2) integrates this with our prior work on using Generative Recurrent Neural Networks (GRNN) and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) [7]- [8] as a local path planner; and (3) adopts online, slip-compensating Receding Horizon Motion Control (RHMC) [2]- [4] path tracking. Additionally, our framework generates a real-time updated map of static obstacles and traversable terrain in the environment, used both by the local dynamic planner and by a FS collision avoidance module.…”

“…The minimum energy paths between all pairwise combinations of locations-calculated using the energy cost of motion model developed in [5]-are used to generate a 'goal graph', over which an asymmetric travelling salesman problem is solved to yield the optimal ordering of visits and the corresponding energy-minimising global plan. The approach in this paper builds upon our work in [6] by constraining the robot to operate in Ackermann configuration, thereby forbidding motion in any directions without adequate perception coverage for the sake of safety. Each sample pose in the PRM was therefore connected by Clothoid curve segments, to generate a continuous curvature path that is easily trackable by such a vehicle.…”

“…This work is primarily motivated by recent developments in the automation of field operations for unstructured environments such as construction, mining, and agriculture [1], where the application of field robotics has the potential to automate many essential or desirable tasks that are often labour-intensive, tedious or dangerous. To achieve this, however, a number of significant challenges must be addressed, including robust motion control across a variety of terrains [2]- [4], long-term autonomy and efficiency under resource constraints [5]- [6], and safe operation around moving obstacles [7]- [8]. In this paper we propose a principled operational framework capable of handling these challenges, building upon our recent research and development activities in agricultural robotics.…”