A Control Method for a Swarm of Plant Pot Robots that Uses Artificial Potential Fields for Effective Utilization of Sunlight

Abstract

<div class=""abs_img""><img src=""[disp_template_path]/JRM/abst-image/00260004/13.jpg"" width=""300"" />Plant pot robots “Plantroid”</span></div> Plant production factories and agricultural robots are being studied and developed these days. In these cultivation systems, however, it has been difficult to manage the state of each individual plant. We propose a cultivation system that uses a swarm of plant pot robots to automatically move each plant to an optimal environment, based on the plant’s sensory information and surroundings. In this paper, we propose a control method for the swarm of plant pot robots that uses artificial potential fields for effective temporal and spatial utilization of sunlight, and we show its effectiveness through simulation and experimentation. </span>