Intermittent Deployment for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Forage Perception: Data Synthesis, Prediction, and Planning

TL;DR

This paper presents an integrated approach using data synthesis, neural networks, and multi-robot deployment to monitor and predict pastureland growth patterns for improved agricultural land management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel pipeline combining data synthesis, deep learning, and multi-robot planning for efficient large-scale pastureland monitoring.

Findings

The neural network accurately predicts pastureland growth dynamics.

The multi-robot deployment strategy reduces monitoring costs.

The pipeline outperforms existing methods in large-scale environment assessment.

Abstract

Monitoring the health and vigor of grasslands is vital for informing management decisions to optimize rotational grazing in agriculture applications. To take advantage of forage resources and improve land productivity, we require knowledge of pastureland growth patterns that is simply unavailable at state of the art. In this paper, we propose to deploy a team of robots to monitor the evolution of an unknown pastureland environment to fulfill the above goal. To monitor such an environment, which usually evolves slowly, we need to design a strategy for rapid assessment of the environment over large areas at a low cost. Thus, we propose an integrated pipeline comprising of data synthesis, deep neural network training and prediction along with a multi-robot deployment algorithm that monitors pasturelands intermittently. Specifically, using expert-informed agricultural data coupled with novel data synthesis in ROS Gazebo, we first propose a new neural network architecture to learn the spatiotemporal dynamics of the environment. Such predictions help us to understand pastureland growth patterns on large scales and make appropriate monitoring decisions for the future. Based on our predictions, we then design an intermittent multi-robot deployment policy for low-cost monitoring. Finally, we compare the proposed pipeline with other methods, from data synthesis to prediction and planning, to corroborate our pipeline's performance.