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A Unified Topological Representation for Robotic Fleets in Agricultural

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Agricultural robots offer a viable solution to the critical challenges of productivity and sustainability of modern agriculture. The widespread deployment of agricultural robotic fleets, however, is still hindered by the overall system's complexity, requiring the integration of several nontrivial components for the operation of each robot but also the orchestration of robots working with each other and human workers. This paper proposes a topological map as the unifying representation and computational model to facilitate the smooth deployment of robotic fleets in agriculture. This topological abstraction of the system state (probabilistic estimates of the functional states and locations of the agents in the environment abstracted to the topological map representations—e.g., human picker at a nodenpand robot traversing on edgeep,q) results in an efficient representation of large-scale environments (in many hectares), but also offers the scalable and efficient operation of the entire fleet and allows for ex situ modeling and analysis of operations. The practical use of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a horticultural use case with a fleet of robots supporting the work of human fruit pickers. The critical components of the system are analyzed and evaluated in deployment in both realistic digital twin and real-life soft fruit farms of different scales, demonstrating the scalability and effectiveness of the proposed framework. The presented framework is general and should be easy to adopt in other multirobot/multihuman scenarios, such as warehouse logistics, cleaning, and maintenance of public spaces.

Funding

Autonomous robots to support fruit picking

Innovate UK

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The First Fleet. The world's first fleet of multi modal soft fruit robots

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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Robot Highways

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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AGRI-OPENCORE. Accelerated delivery of robotic crop harvesting systems for horticulture

Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

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History

School affiliated with

  • Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology (Research Outputs)
  • College of Health and Science (Research Outputs)

Publication Title

Journal of Field Robotics

Publisher

Wiley

ISSN

1556-4959

eISSN

1556-4967

Date Submitted

2023-08-31

Date Accepted

2024-11-17

Date of First Publication

2024-12-26

Date of Final Publication

2024-12-26

Open Access Status

  • Open Access

Will your conference paper be published in proceedings?

  • N/A

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