2,773 research outputs found
Evaluation of laser range-finder mapping for agricultural spraying vehicles
In this paper, we present a new application of laser range-finder sensing to agricultural spraying vehicles. The current generation of spraying vehicles use automatic controllers to maintain the height of the sprayer booms above the crop.
However, these control systems are typically based on ultrasonic sensors mounted on the booms, which limits the accuracy of the measurements and the response of the controller to changes in the terrain, resulting in a sub-optimal spraying process. To overcome these limitations, we propose to use a laser scanner, attached to the front of the sprayer's cabin, to scan the ground surface in front of the vehicle and to build a scrolling 3d map of the terrain. We evaluate the proposed solution in a series of field tests, demonstrating that the approach provides a more detailed and accurate representation of the environment than the current sonar-based solution, and which can lead to the development of more efficient boom control systems
Ground Profile Recovery from Aerial 3D LiDAR-based Maps
The paper presents the study and implementation of the ground detection
methodology with filtration and removal of forest points from LiDAR-based 3D
point cloud using the Cloth Simulation Filtering (CSF) algorithm. The
methodology allows to recover a terrestrial relief and create a landscape map
of a forestry region. As the proof-of-concept, we provided the outdoor flight
experiment, launching a hexacopter under a mixed forestry region with sharp
ground changes nearby Innopolis city (Russia), which demonstrated the
encouraging results for both ground detection and methodology robustness.Comment: 8 pages, FRUCT-2019 conferenc
Integrasjon av et minimalistisk sett av sensorer for kartlegging og lokalisering av landbruksroboter
Robots have recently become ubiquitous in many aspects of daily life. For in-house applications there is vacuuming, mopping and lawn-mowing robots. Swarms of robots have been used in Amazon warehouses for several years. Autonomous driving cars, despite being set back by several safety issues, are undeniably becoming the standard of the automobile industry. Not just being useful for commercial applications, robots can perform various tasks, such as inspecting hazardous sites, taking part in search-and-rescue missions. Regardless of end-user applications, autonomy plays a crucial role in modern robots. The essential capabilities required for autonomous operations are mapping, localization and navigation. The goal of this thesis is to develop a new approach to solve the problems of mapping, localization, and navigation for autonomous robots in agriculture. This type of environment poses some unique challenges such as repetitive patterns, large-scale sparse features environments, in comparison to other scenarios such as urban/cities, where the abundance of good features such as pavements, buildings, road lanes, traffic signs, etc., exists.
In outdoor agricultural environments, a robot can rely on a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) to determine its whereabouts. It is often limited to the robot's activities to accessible GNSS signal areas. It would fail for indoor environments. In this case, different types of exteroceptive sensors such as (RGB, Depth, Thermal) cameras, laser scanner, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) and proprioceptive sensors such as Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), wheel-encoders can be fused to better estimate the robot's states. Generic approaches of combining several different sensors often yield superior estimation results but they are not always optimal in terms of cost-effectiveness, high modularity, reusability, and interchangeability. For agricultural robots, it is equally important for being robust for long term operations as well as being cost-effective for mass production.
We tackle this challenge by exploring and selectively using a handful of sensors such as RGB-D cameras, LiDAR and IMU for representative agricultural environments. The sensor fusion algorithms provide high precision and robustness for mapping and localization while at the same time assuring cost-effectiveness by employing only the necessary sensors for a task at hand. In this thesis, we extend the LiDAR mapping and localization methods for normal urban/city scenarios to cope with the agricultural environments where the presence of slopes, vegetation, trees render the traditional approaches to fail. Our mapping method substantially reduces the memory footprint for map storing, which is important for large-scale farms. We show how to handle the localization problem in dynamic growing strawberry polytunnels by using only a stereo visual-inertial (VI) and depth sensor to extract and track only invariant features. This eliminates the need for remapping to deal with dynamic scenes. Also, for a demonstration of the minimalistic requirement for autonomous agricultural robots, we show the ability to autonomously traverse between rows in a difficult environment of zigzag-liked polytunnel using only a laser scanner. Furthermore, we present an autonomous navigation capability by using only a camera without explicitly performing mapping or localization. Finally, our mapping and localization methods are generic and platform-agnostic, which can be applied to different types of agricultural robots.
All contributions presented in this thesis have been tested and validated on real robots in real agricultural environments. All approaches have been published or submitted in peer-reviewed conference papers and journal articles.Roboter har nylig blitt standard i mange deler av hverdagen. I hjemmet har vi støvsuger-, vaske- og gressklippende roboter. Svermer med roboter har blitt brukt av Amazons varehus i mange år. Autonome selvkjørende biler, til tross for å ha vært satt tilbake av sikkerhetshensyn, er udiskutabelt på vei til å bli standarden innen bilbransjen. Roboter har mer nytte enn rent kommersielt bruk. Roboter kan utføre forskjellige oppgaver, som å inspisere farlige områder og delta i leteoppdrag. Uansett hva sluttbrukeren velger å gjøre, spiller autonomi en viktig rolle i moderne roboter. De essensielle egenskapene for autonome operasjoner i landbruket er kartlegging, lokalisering og navigering. Denne type miljø gir spesielle utfordringer som repetitive mønstre og storskala miljø med få landskapsdetaljer, sammenlignet med andre steder, som urbane-/bymiljø, hvor det finnes mange landskapsdetaljer som fortau, bygninger, trafikkfelt, trafikkskilt, etc.
I utendørs jordbruksmiljø kan en robot bruke Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) til å navigere sine omgivelser. Dette begrenser robotens aktiviteter til områder med tilgjengelig GNSS signaler. Dette vil ikke fungere i miljøer innendørs. I ett slikt tilfelle vil reseptorer mot det eksterne miljø som (RGB-, dybde-, temperatur-) kameraer, laserskannere, «Light detection and Ranging» (LiDAR) og propriopsjonære detektorer som treghetssensorer (IMU) og hjulenkodere kunne brukes sammen for å bedre kunne estimere robotens tilstand. Generisk kombinering av forskjellige sensorer fører til overlegne estimeringsresultater, men er ofte suboptimale med hensyn på kostnadseffektivitet, moduleringingsgrad og utbyttbarhet. For landbruksroboter så er det like viktig med robusthet for lang tids bruk som kostnadseffektivitet for masseproduksjon.
Vi taklet denne utfordringen med å utforske og selektivt velge en håndfull sensorer som RGB-D kameraer, LiDAR og IMU for representative landbruksmiljø. Algoritmen som kombinerer sensorsignalene gir en høy presisjonsgrad og robusthet for kartlegging og lokalisering, og gir samtidig kostnadseffektivitet med å bare bruke de nødvendige sensorene for oppgaven som skal utføres. I denne avhandlingen utvider vi en LiDAR kartlegging og lokaliseringsmetode normalt brukt i urbane/bymiljø til å takle landbruksmiljø, hvor hellinger, vegetasjon og trær gjør at tradisjonelle metoder mislykkes. Vår metode reduserer signifikant lagringsbehovet for kartlagring, noe som er viktig for storskala gårder. Vi viser hvordan lokaliseringsproblemet i dynamisk voksende jordbær-polytuneller kan løses ved å bruke en stereo visuel inertiel (VI) og en dybdesensor for å ekstrahere statiske objekter. Dette eliminerer behovet å kartlegge på nytt for å klare dynamiske scener. I tillegg demonstrerer vi de minimalistiske kravene for autonome jordbruksroboter. Vi viser robotens evne til å bevege seg autonomt mellom rader i ett vanskelig miljø med polytuneller i sikksakk-mønstre ved bruk av kun en laserskanner. Videre presenterer vi en autonom navigeringsevne ved bruk av kun ett kamera uten å eksplisitt kartlegge eller lokalisere. Til slutt viser vi at kartleggings- og lokaliseringsmetodene er generiske og platform-agnostiske, noe som kan brukes med flere typer jordbruksroboter.
Alle bidrag presentert i denne avhandlingen har blitt testet og validert med ekte roboter i ekte landbruksmiljø. Alle forsøk har blitt publisert eller sendt til fagfellevurderte konferansepapirer og journalartikler
Robot-assisted Soil Apparent Electrical Conductivity Measurements in Orchards
Soil apparent electrical conductivity (ECa) is a vital metric in Precision
Agriculture and Smart Farming, as it is used for optimal water content
management, geological mapping, and yield prediction. Several existing methods
seeking to estimate soil electrical conductivity are available, including
physical soil sampling, ground sensor installation and monitoring, and the use
of sensors that can obtain proximal ECa estimates. However, such methods can be
either very laborious and/or too costly for practical use over larger field
canopies. Robot-assisted ECa measurements, in contrast, may offer a scalable
and cost-effective solution. In this work, we present one such solution that
involves a ground mobile robot equipped with a customized and adjustable
platform to hold an Electromagnetic Induction (EMI) sensor to perform
semi-autonomous and on-demand ECa measurements under various field conditions.
The platform is designed to be easily re-configurable in terms of sensor
placement; results from testing for traversability and robot-to-sensor
interference across multiple case studies help establish appropriate tradeoffs
for sensor placement. Further, a developed simulation software package enables
rapid and accessible estimation of terrain traversability in relation to
desired EMI sensor placement. Extensive experimental evaluation across
different fields demonstrates that the obtained robot-assisted ECa measurements
are of high linearity compared with the ground truth (data collected manually
by a handheld EMI sensor) by scoring more than in Pearson correlation
coefficient in both plot measurements and estimated ECa maps generated by
kriging interpolation. The proposed robotic solution supports autonomous
behavior development in the field since it utilizes the ROS navigation stack
along with the RTK GNSS positioning data and features various ranging sensors.Comment: 15 pages, 16 figure
Cost-effective robot for steep slope crops monitoring
This project aims to develop a low cost, simple and robust robot able to autonomously monitorcrops using simple sensors. It will be required do develop robotic sub-systems and integrate them with pre-selected mechanical components, electrical interfaces and robot systems (localization, navigation and perception) using ROS, for wine making regions and maize fields
Localization in Unstructured Environments: Towards Autonomous Robots in Forests with Delaunay Triangulation
Autonomous harvesting and transportation is a long-term goal of the forest
industry. One of the main challenges is the accurate localization of both
vehicles and trees in a forest. Forests are unstructured environments where it
is difficult to find a group of significant landmarks for current fast
feature-based place recognition algorithms. This paper proposes a novel
approach where local observations are matched to a general tree map using the
Delaunay triangularization as the representation format. Instead of point cloud
based matching methods, we utilize a topology-based method. First, tree trunk
positions are registered at a prior run done by a forest harvester. Second, the
resulting map is Delaunay triangularized. Third, a local submap of the
autonomous robot is registered, triangularized and matched using triangular
similarity maximization to estimate the position of the robot. We test our
method on a dataset accumulated from a forestry site at Lieksa, Finland. A
total length of 2100\,m of harvester path was recorded by an industrial
harvester with a 3D laser scanner and a geolocation unit fixed to the frame.
Our experiments show a 12\,cm s.t.d. in the location accuracy and with
real-time data processing for speeds not exceeding 0.5\,m/s. The accuracy and
speed limit is realistic during forest operations
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