Abstract
A heterogeneous robotic system that can perform various tasks in the steep vineyards of the Mediterranean region was developed and tested as part of the HEKTOR—Heterogeneous Autonomous Robotic System in Viticulture and Mariculture—project. This article describes the design of hardware and an easy-to-use method for evaluating the energy consumption of the system, as well as, indirectly, its deployment readiness level. The heterogeneous robotic system itself consisted of a flying robot—a light autonomous aerial robot (LAAR)—and a ground robot—an all-terrain mobile manipulator (ATMM), composed of an all-terrain mobile robot (ATMR) platform and a seven-degree-of-freedom (DoF) torque-controlled robotic arm. A formal approach to describe the topology and parameters of selected vineyards is presented. It is shown how Google Earth data can be used to make an initial estimation of energy consumption for a selected vineyard. On this basis, estimates of energy consumption were made for the tasks of protective spraying and bud rubbing. The experiments were conducted in two different vineyards, one with a moderate slope and the other with a much steeper slope, to evaluate the proposed estimation method.
Highlights
The applications of robotics in agriculture are developing dynamically and robots in agriculture represent a significant share in the class of professional service robots [1,2]
The heterogeneous robotic system itself consisted of a flying robot—a light autonomous aerial robot (LAAR)—and a ground robot—an all-terrain mobile manipulator (ATMM), composed of an all-terrain mobile robot (ATMR) platform and a seven-degreeof-freedom (DoF) torque-controlled robotic arm
The heterogeneous robotic system (Figure 1) being developed as part of the HEKTOR— Heterogeneous Autonomous Robotic System in Viticulture and Mariculture—project consists of a lightweight autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that performs aerial vineyard observation and 3D mapping and provides the basis for successful navigation and task execution of the ground-based all-terrain mobile manipulator (ATMM) (Figure 2) along vineyard rows [11,12]
Summary
The applications of robotics in agriculture are developing dynamically and robots in agriculture represent a significant share in the class of professional service robots [1,2]. The heterogeneous robotic system (Figure 1) being developed as part of the HEKTOR— Heterogeneous Autonomous Robotic System in Viticulture and Mariculture—project consists of a lightweight autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle that performs aerial vineyard observation and 3D mapping and provides the basis for successful navigation and task execution (protective spraying and bud rubbing) of the ground-based all-terrain mobile manipulator (ATMM) (Figure 2) along vineyard rows [11,12]. The novelty described in the paper is a formal description of a vineyard configuration (layout) extended by a set of parameters related to individual vineyard elements and the vineyard as a whole Such a description leads to the additional originality of the work, a methodology that allows the energy consumption of the robotic system to be estimated based on this formal description and the input data collected before the pure application of the described robotic system. The methodology for estimating the energy consumption of the robotic system based on the proposed formal description of the vineyard is presented. The paper concludes with comments on the obtained results and presents ideas for future work
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