Related papers: Swarm Robots in Agriculture
The Agentic Service Ecosystem consists of heterogeneous autonomous agents (e.g., intelligent machines, humans, and human-machine hybrid systems) that interact through resource exchange and service co-creation. These agents, with distinct…
Agriculture is facing a labor crisis, leading to increased interest in fleets of small, under-canopy robots (agbots) that can perform precise, targeted actions (e.g., crop scouting, weeding, fertilization), while being supervised by human…
Swarm intelligence is the collective behavior emerging in systems with locally interacting components. Because of their self-organization capabilities, swarm-based systems show essential properties for handling real-world problems such as…
A current problem in the design of small and lightweight autonomous agricultural robots is how to create sufficient traction on soil to pull an agricultural implement or load. One promising solution is offered by the interlock drive system,…
Agri-Food is the largest manufacturing sector in the UK. It supports a food chain that generates over {\pounds}108bn p.a., with 3.9m employees in a truly international industry and exports {\pounds}20bn of UK manufactured goods. However,…
An open research question has been whether a single human can supervise a true heterogeneous swarm of robots completing tasks in real world environments. A general concern is whether or not the human's workload will be taxed to the breaking…
Mechanizing the manual harvesting of fresh market fruits constitutes one of the biggest challenges to the sustainability of the fruit industry. During manual harvesting of some fresh-market crops like strawberries and table grapes, pickers…
We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot network cannot…
Due to its decentralised, distributed and scalable nature, swarm robotics has great potential for applications ranging from agriculture to environmental monitoring and logistics. Various swarm control methods and algorithms are currently…
Achieving long term autonomy of robots operating in dynamic environments such as farms remains a significant challenge. Arguably, the most demanding factors to achieve this are the on-board resource constraints such as energy, planning in…
The world population is anticipated to increase by close to 2 billion by 2050 causing a rapid escalation of food demand. A recent projection shows that the world is lagging behind accomplishing the "Zero Hunger" goal, in spite of some…
Robotic hardware designs are becoming more complex as the variety and number of on-board sensors increase and as greater computational power is provided in ever-smaller packages on-board robots. These advances in hardware, however, do not…
The application of autonomous robots in agriculture is gaining increasing popularity thanks to the high impact it may have on food security, sustainability, resource use efficiency, reduction of chemical treatments, and the optimization of…
Autonomous swarms of robots can bring robustness, scalability and adaptability to safety-critical tasks such as search and rescue but their application is still very limited. Using semi-autonomous swarms with human control can bring robot…
This work is devoted to communication approaches, which spread information in robot swarms. These mechanisms are useful for large-scale systems and also for such cases when a limited communication equipment does not allow routing of…
In robot swarms operating under highly restrictive sensing and communication constraints, individuals may need to use direct physical proximity to facilitate information exchange. However, in certain task-related scenarios, this requirement…
The limited energy capacity of individual robotic agents in a swarm often limits the possible cooperative tasks they can perform. In this work, we investigate the problem of covering an unknown connected grid environment (e.g. a maze or…
Robotic arms are highly common in various automation processes such as manufacturing lines. However, these highly capable robots are usually degraded to simple repetitive tasks such as pick-and-place. On the other hand, designing an optimal…
This paper investigates the role of communication in improving coordination within robot swarms, focusing on a paradigm where learning and execution occur simultaneously in a decentralized manner. We highlight the role communication can…
Precision robotic pollination systems can not only fill the gap of declining natural pollinators, but can also surpass them in efficiency and uniformity, helping to feed the fast-growing human population on Earth. This paper presents the…