Swarm Robotics as a Solution to Crops Inspection for Precision Agriculture

Abstract

This paper summarizes the concept of swarm robotics and its applicability to crop inspections. To increase the agricultural yield it is essential to monitor the crop health.Hence, precision agriculture is becoming a common practice for farmers providing a system that can inspect the state of the plants ( Khosla and others, 2010). One of the rising technologies used for agricultural inspections is the use of unmaned air vehicles (UAVs) which are used to take aerial pictures of the farms so that the images could be processed to extract data about the state of the crops (Das et al., 2015). For this process both fixed wings and quadrotors UAVs are used with a preference over the quadrotor since it's easier to operate and has a milder learning curve compared to fixed wings (Kolodny, 2017). UAVs require battery replacement especially when the environmental conditions result in longer inspection times ("Agriculture -Maximize Yields with Aerial Imaging," n.d., "Matrice 100 -DJI Wiki," n.d.). As a result, inspection systems for crops using commercial quadrotors are limited by the quadrotor´s maximum flight speed, maximum flight height, quadrotor´s battery time, crops area, wind conditions, etc.("Mission Estimates," n.d.).

Swarm Robotics: A Perspective on the Latest Reviewed Concepts and Applications

“…Another relevant area for the application of swarm robotics is farming [ 142 , 151 ]. These applications can be used for various tasks, such as inspection and mapping [ 152 , 153 ]. These techniques also apply to seeding [ 154 ], cereal harvesting [ 155 ], plant care [ 156 ], weeding [ 157 ], and so on.…”

“…They performed bench tests that indicate the feasibility of their proposal. Carbone et al [ 153 ] study the usage of UAVs for crop inspections in farming. They overview a set of features, displaying advantages and disadvantages of different UAV models in these tasks performance.…”

Adoption of Precision Agriculture by Detecting and Spraying Herbicide using UAV

“…(Disruptive Technologies for Agriculture) include Reinforcement learning (Sutton & Barto, 1998), Swarm Robotics, (Carbone et al, 2018) Cyber Physical Systems, Drones, Fog (or) Edge computing have to be used, for effective monitoring of weeds.…”

Multi-Agent Path Planning of Robotic Swarms in Agricultural Fields

“…The particular task considered in this paper, path planning, is part of collective exploration. Swarm robotic is a relatively new possibility for agriculture with much potential (Carbone et al, 2018). The aim of path planning is to explore an entire area as efficiently as possible (Oksanen and Visala, 2009a).…”

“…Satellites or robots (especially unmanned aerial vehicles, called UAVs (Hassler and Baysal-Gurel, 2019)) are used to collect such images over farm lands. A current research area is improving this automation, in particular managing robot swarms for precision agriculture (Carbone et al, 2018). This includes automatic design of ways that UAVs do exploration, collaboration on tasks, communicate and find the optimal fleet formations.…”