Smart Parking System Using Heuristic Optimization For Autonomous Transportation Robots In Agriculture

<p>This paper formulates a heuristic assignment algorithm for assigning parking spaces to autonomous transportation robots in a polytunnel or parallel aisle-based environment. The algorithm is named Smart Parking and is then implemented and tested for performance in a Python-based simulation software. It is also integrated into a Robot Controller called RASberry, which in itself is a state-of-the-art research project funded by the UKRI in managing a fully automated strawberry farm. Throvald by Saga Robotics is the robot used for autonomous transportation in the RASberry project and the real-world experiments in this paper. A set of real-world experiments are also performed via RASberry - Thorvald system to observe and analyse the performance of Smart Parking. It has been validated through graphical trend lines and statistical testing that Smart Parking outperforms Standard Parking in terms of mechanical conservation and task completion time.</p>