A Unified Topological Representation for Robotic Fleets in Agricultural
Applications
Abstract
Agricultural robots offer a viable solution to the critical challenges
of productivity and sustainability of modern agriculture. The widespread
deployment of agricultural robotic fleets, however, is still hindered by
the overall system’s complexity, requiring the integration of several
non-trivial components for the operation of each robot but also the
orchestration of robots working with each other and human workers. This
paper proposes a topological map as the unifying representation and
computational model to facilitate the smooth deployment of robotic
fleets in agriculture. This topological abstraction of the system state
results in an efficient representation of large-scale environments, but
also offers the scalable and efficient operation of the entire fleet and
allows for ex-situ modelling and analysis of operations. The practical
use of the proposed framework is demonstrated in a horticultural use
case with a fleet of robots supporting the work of human fruit pickers.
The critical components of the system are analysed and evaluated in
deployment in both realistic digital twin and real-life soft fruit farms
of different scales, demonstrating the scalability and effectiveness of
the proposed framework. The presented framework is general and should be
easy to adopt in other multi-robot/multi-human scenarios such as
warehouse logistics, cleaning and maintenance of public spaces.