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Boosting Cost-Efficiency in Robotics: A Distributed Computing Approach for Harvesting Robots
  • +2
  • Feng Xie,
  • Tao Li,
  • Qingchun Feng,
  • Hui Zhao,
  • Chunjiang Zhao
Feng Xie
Jiangsu University
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Tao Li
Beijing Research Center of Intelligent Equipment for Agriculture

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Qingchun Feng
Beijing Research Center of Intelligent Equipment for Agriculture
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Hui Zhao
Tianjin University of Technology
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Chunjiang Zhao
Beijing Research Center of Intelligent Equipment for Agriculture
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Abstract

Multi-arm harvesting robots offer a promising solution to the labor shortage in fruit harvesting, due to their ability to improve harvesting efficiency. However, multi-arm harvesters necessitate additional visual sensors to acquire distribution information of fruits within larger working spaces. Greater demands are consequently imposed on graphics computation, leading to increased costs in computing hardware of robot system. To balance the graphics computing cost and reduce energy consumption, distributed graphics computation frameworks for multi-arm robot vision system are proposed in this study. First, a host-edge framework is proposed to assign the tasks of image inference and depth alignment to host computer and edge computing modules through a decentralized mode of local connection. Moreover, to increase the endurance time of robot in application, the edge computing modules are reduced and the fifth generation mobile communication is integrated into robot graphics computing system to transfer on-board image processing to a remote computing server with MQTT protocol. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework, comprehensive experiments were performed, demonstrating that, compared with traditional computing framework, the proposed local distributed framework reduced 35.6% average time consumption, and over 20 FPS average processing speed can be achieve. The remote distributed framework has reduced the computational power consumption of the on-board system by approximately 23.1% while ensuring the performance is not lower than the local distributed framework. Finally, by discussing the two frameworks in terms of stability and cost, we present the commercial viability for the application of multi-arm harvesting robot.
Submitted to Journal of Field Robotics
19 Mar 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
20 Apr 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
21 Apr 2024Editorial Decision: Revise Minor
11 Jun 2024Assigned to Editor
11 Jun 2024Submission Checks Completed
11 Jun 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
07 Jul 20242nd Revision Received
22 Jul 2024Reviewer(s) Assigned
21 Aug 2024Review(s) Completed, Editorial Evaluation Pending
26 Aug 2024Editorial Decision: Accept