Abstract
The development of robotic applications for agricultural environments has several problems which are not present in the robotic systems used for indoor environments. Some of these problems can be solved with an efficient navigation system. In this paper, a new system is introduced to improve the navigation tasks for those robots which operate in agricultural environments. Concretely, the paper focuses on the problem related to the autonomous mapping of agricultural parcels (i.e., an orange grove). The map created by the system will be used to help the robots navigate into the parcel to perform maintenance tasks such as weed removal, harvest, or pest inspection. The proposed system connects to a satellite positioning service to obtain the real coordinates where the robotic system is placed. With these coordinates, the parcel information is downloaded from an online map service in order to autonomously obtain a map of the parcel in a readable format for the robot. Finally, path planning is performed by means of Fast Marching techniques using the robot or a team of two robots. This paper introduces the proof-of-concept and describes all the necessary steps and algorithms to obtain the path planning just from the initial coordinates of the robot.
Highlights
Agriculture is an important industry to the national economy in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, and other countries around the world
This paper introduces a proof-of-concept where we target the combination of public satellite imagery along with parcel information provided by governmental institutions
This paper has shown a proof-of-concept of a novel path planning based on remote imagery publicly available
Summary
Agriculture is an important industry to the national economy in Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland, and other countries around the world. Census (http://www.ine.es/jaxi/Tabla.htm?path=/t01/p042/ccaa_prov/l0/&file=010101.px&L=0), 64% of the agricultural terrain was held in properties of 5 or more hectares. Those farms are located in those zones which are mainly devoted to permanent crops: orchards, olive groves, citric groves, and vineyards. Only in the area of Valencia (Spain), there are more than 100,000 small farms with an exploitation area lower than 1 hectare. This represents 50% of the total number of farms located in Valencia and 20% of the small farms located in Spain
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