Abstract
Nowadays, multi-robot systems are being utilized to perform agricultural tasks. It is particularly essential to robotize pesticide spraying because of the risk of poisoning workers. However, the problem is that the human-driven sprayers are big size, and difficult to maneuver in many orchards. Therefore, heavy spraying robots must be replaced with lighter robots. Also, it takes a lot of times to perform spraying using only one sprayer in a large orchard. To achieve this goal, the multi-robot system (MRS) can be applied to the spraying by robot cooperation to improve performance. In this study, we developed a task allocation system based on a Voronoi diagram for a multi-robot spraying system in an orchard. The seed point for area partition using the Voronoi diagram was obtained through node clustering using a $k$ -means clustering algorithm. In the experiment, workspaces were partitioned according to the number of robots, from 2 to 10. A total of four metrics were used to evaluate the performance of the system. The results confirmed that our task allocation system is applicable to real orchards.
Highlights
Pesticide spraying significantly improves crop productivity, and must be performed in orchards, especially because pears and apples are susceptible to infection
TT is very important in multi-robot task allocation (MRTA) system and these results indicate that using an multi-robot system (MRS) can increase work efficiency
In this study, we developed a task allocation system for a pesticide-spraying multi-robot system based on a Voronoi diagram
Summary
Pesticide spraying significantly improves crop productivity, and must be performed in orchards, especially because pears and apples are susceptible to infection. Our approach for MRTA is partitioning the workspaces according to the number of robots, assign each sub-area to the robot, and control the robot to perform spraying in its zone. VOLUME 8, 2020 cooperatively perform area coverage related tasks in a known environment The focus of this approach is to perform task allocation and coordination using only the robots’ local position information. [40] have been proposed the formation control of a mobile robot following a leader based on Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology, allowing the relative localization of two mobiles avoiding the limitations of GPS when moving close to high vegetation This approach is the way follower robots follow the leader, so there is a problem that if a leader becomes non-workable status, followers cannot task either. J=1 x Cj where k is defined as the number of multi-robots for spraying task
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