Building a distributed robot garden

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e. g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. Task allocation, sensing and manipulation are distributed in the system and de-centrally coordinated. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition and manipulation.

Authors

• Nikolaus Correll
• Nikos Aréchiga
• Adrienne Bolger
• Mario Bollini
• Benjamin Charrow
• Adam Clayton
• Felipe Dominguez
• Kenneth Donahue
• Samuel Dyar
• Luke Johnson
• Huan Liu
• Alexander Patrikalakis
• Timothy Robertson
• Jeremy Smith
• Daniel E. Soltero
• Melissa Tanner
• Lauren White
• Daniela Rus

Keywords

• Robot kinematics
• Robot sensing systems
• Buildings
• Mesh networks
• Mobile robots
• Manipulators
• Robot vision systems
• Cameras
• Computer networks
• Monitoring
• Horticultural
• Object Recognition
• Mesh Network
• Task Allocation
• Networks In Plants
• Garden Plants
• Robotic Network
• Mobile Manipulator
• Training Set
• High Load
• Ripening
• Feedback Control
• Macrophytes
• End-effector
• Precision Agriculture
• Odometry
• Routing Algorithm
• Target Pattern
• Robot Operating System
• Visual Servoing
• Green Tomatoes
• Feature-based Approaches
• Red Tomato
• HTTP Requests
• Docking Station
• Navigation Errors
• Sobel Operator
• Global Localization
• Vision Algorithms