Structured Ecological Cultivation With Autonomous Robots in Agriculture: Toward a Fully Autonomous Robotic Indoor Farming System

Abstract

To support the hypothesis that embracing robotics has the potential to address farming challenges and, at the same time, replace large and complex farm machinery, this article proposes designing a farm around a heterogeneous robotic system dubbed Structured Ecological Cultivation With Autonomous Robots in Agriculture (SPECULARIA). This multirobot system has mobile robots deployed to work just like in a warehouse, moving plants grown in containers to make sure every plant receives optimal care in ideal growing conditions. By structuring the work cell environment around a stationary dual-arm manipulator, the system can plan and execute procedures to control every plant’s growth and hygiene, from seed to harvest. Such a system surpasses current farming robots in scalability and versatility. We showcase compliance control algorithms combined with artificial intelligence (AI), which helps build a functional model of the plant. The same approach is used to program different plant treatments. Finally, we benchmark the proposed setup with a classical mobile manipulation approach to demonstrate its feasibility.