Experimental Evaluation of a Hierarchical Operating Framework for Ground Robots in Agriculture

TL;DR

This paper empirically evaluates a hierarchical framework enabling ground robots to autonomously operate in large-scale, unstructured agricultural environments, demonstrating effective navigation and task execution amidst dynamic changes.

Contribution

It introduces and validates a hierarchical operating framework for long-term autonomous ground robot deployment in agriculture, addressing real-world unstructured and dynamic conditions.

Findings

Framework successfully navigates unstructured environments

Enables autonomous weeding with moving individuals present

Validates long-term deployment feasibility in large-scale farming

Abstract

For mobile robots to be effectively applied to real world unstructured environments -- such as large scale farming -- they require the ability to generate adaptive plans that account both for limited onboard resources, and the presence of dynamic changes, including nearby moving individuals. This work provides a real world empirical evaluation of our proposed hierarchical framework for long-term autonomy of field robots, conducted on University of Sydney's Swagbot agricultural robot platform. We demonstrate the ability of the framework to navigate an unstructured and dynamic environment in an effective manner, validating its use for long-term deployment in large scale farming, for tasks such as autonomous weeding in the presence of moving individuals.