Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

  • Special Issue
  • Published:
Intelligent Service Robotics Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system with applications in urban/indoor precision agriculture. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. By embedding sensing, computation, and communication into the pots, task allocation in the system is de-centrally coordinated, which makes the system scalable and robust against the failure of a centralized agent. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition, and manipulation as well as challenges that lie ahead toward autonomous precision agriculture with multi-robot teams.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Explore related subjects

Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.

References

  1. Al-Kufaishi S, Blackmore B, Sourell H (2005) The potential contribution of precision irrigation to water conservation. In: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on precision agriculture, pp 943–950

  2. Amstutz P, Correll N, Martinoli A (2009) Distributed boundary coverage with a team of networked miniature robots using a robust market-based algorithm. Ann Math Artif Intell (Special Issue Cover Explor Search) 52(2–4): 307–333

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  3. Åstrand B, Baerveldt AJ (2002) An agricultural mobile robot with vision-based perception for mechanical weed control. Auton Robots 13(1): 21–35

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  4. Blackmore B (2007) A systems view of agricultural robots. In: Proceedings of the 6th European conference on precision agriculture, pp 23–31

  5. Blackmore B, Fountas S, Gemtos T, Vougioukas S (2006) Ecobots: improved energy utilisation through smaller smarter machines. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IFAC international workshop on bio-robotics

  6. Chaumette F, Hutchinson S (2006) Visual servo control part i: basic approaches. Robot Autom Mag 13(4): 82–90

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Correll N, Arechiga N, Bolger A, Bollini M, Charrow B, Clayton A, Dominguez F, Donahue K, Dyar S, Johnson L, Liu H, Patrikalakis A, Robertson T, Smith J, Soltero D, Tanner M, White L, Rus D (2009) Building a distributed robot garden. In: IEEE/RSJ International conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), St. Louis, MO, pp 1509–1516

  8. Edan Y (1995) Design of an autonomous agricultural robot. Appl Intell 5(1): 41–50

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. van Henten E, Hemming J, van Tuijl B, Kornet J, Meuleman J, Bontsema J, van Os E (2002) An autonomous robot for harvesting cucumbers in greenhouses. Auton Robots 13(3): 241–258

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  10. Jagannatha S, Levesque A, Singh Y (2001) Approximation-based control and avoidance of a mobile base with an onboard arm for mars greenhouse operation. In: Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE international symposium on intelligent control, pp 103–108

  11. Jimenez A, Ceres R, Pons J (2000) A survey of computer vision methods for locating fruit on trees. Trans ASAE 43(6): 1911–1920

    Google Scholar 

  12. Kim Y, Evans R, Iversen W, Pierce F (2006) Instrumentation and control for wireless sensor network for automated irrigation. ASAE Paper No 061105, St Joseph, Michigan

  13. Kondo N, Nishitsuji Y, Ling P, Ting K (1996) Visual feedback guided robotic cherry tomato harvesting. Trans Am Soc Agric Eng (ASAE) 39(6): 2331–2338

    Google Scholar 

  14. Kondo N, Ninomiya K, Hayashi S (2005) A new challenge of robot for harvesting strawberry grown on table top culture. In: Proceedings of ASAE annual international meeting, Tampa, Florida. Paper number: 053138

  15. Lee W, Slaughter D, Giles D (1995) Robotic weed control system for tomatoes. Precis Agric 1(1): 95–113

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Lochmatter T, Roduit P, Cianci C, Correll N, Jacot J, Martinoli A (2008) Swistrack—a flexible open source tracking software for multi-agent systems. In: IEEE/RSJ International conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), Nice, France, pp 4004–4010

  17. Otte M, Correll N (2010) The any-com approach to multi-robot coordination. In: IEEE International conference on robotics and automation (ICRA), workshop on network science and systems issues in multi-robot autonomy (NETSS), Anchorage, AK, USA

  18. Quigley M, Conley K, Gerkey B, Faust J, Foote T, Leibs J, Wheeler R, Ng A (2009) Ros: an open-source robot operating system. In: International conference on robotics and automation, workshop on open-source robotics, open-source software workshop

  19. Reed J, Miles S, Butler J, Baldwin M, Noble R (2001) Automatic mushroom harvester development. J Agric Eng Res 78(1): 15–23

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Russell B, Torralba A, Murphy K, Freeman W (2008) Labelme: a database and web-based tool for image annotation. Int J Comput Vis 77(1–3): 157–173

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Rusu R, Gerkey B, Beetz M (2008) Robots in the kitchen: exploiting ubiquitous sensing and actuation. Robot Auton Syst (Special Issue Netw Robot Syst) 56: 844–856

    Google Scholar 

  22. Saffiotti A, Broxvall M, Gritti M, LeBlanc K, Lundh R, Rashid J, Seo B, Cho Y (2008) The peis-ecology project: vision and results. In: Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International conference on intelligent robots and systems (IROS), Nice, France, pp 2329–2335

  23. Schwager M, Rus D, Slotine JJ (2009) Decentralized, adaptive coverage control for networked robots. Int J Robot Res 28(3): 357–375

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Srinivasan, A (eds) (2006) Handbook of precision agriculture: principles and applications. CRC Press,

  25. Stentz A (1995) The focussed D* algorithm for real-time replanning. In: Proceedings of the international joint conference on artificial intelligence, pp 1652–1659

  26. Tabb A, Peterson D, Park J (2006) Segmentation of apple fruit from video via background modeling. In: Proceedings of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) Annual International Meeting, Portland, pp 11

  27. Tanigaki K, Fujiura T, Akase A, Imagawa J (2008) Cherry-harvesting robot. Comput Electron Agric 63(1): 65–72. (special issue on bio-robotics)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Torralba A, Murphy K, Freeman W (2004) Sharing features: efficient boosting procedures for multiclass object detection. In: Proceedings of the IEEE computer society conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (CVPR), pp 762–769

  29. Wang N, Zhang N, Wang M (2006) Wireless sensors in agriculture and food industry—recent development and future perspective. Comput Electron Agric 50(1): 1–14

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Zhang W, Kantor G, Singh S (2004) Integrated wireless sensor/actuator networks in agricultural applications. In: Proceedings of ACM SenSys, p 317

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 1111 Engineering Drive, Boulder, CO, 80309, USA

    Nikolaus Correll

  2. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vassar Street 32, Cambridge, MA, 02139, USA

    Nikos Arechiga, Adrienne Bolger, Mario Bollini, Ben Charrow, Adam Clayton, Felipe Dominguez, Kenneth Donahue, Samuel Dyar, Luke Johnson, Huan Liu, Alexander Patrikalakis, Timothy Robertson, Jeremy Smith, Daniel Soltero, Melissa Tanner, Lauren White & Daniela Rus

Authors
  1. Nikolaus Correll
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Nikos Arechiga
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Adrienne Bolger
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  4. Mario Bollini
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  5. Ben Charrow
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  6. Adam Clayton
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  7. Felipe Dominguez
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  8. Kenneth Donahue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  9. Samuel Dyar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  10. Luke Johnson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  11. Huan Liu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  12. Alexander Patrikalakis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  13. Timothy Robertson
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  14. Jeremy Smith
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  15. Daniel Soltero
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  16. Melissa Tanner
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  17. Lauren White
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  18. Daniela Rus
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikolaus Correll.

Additional information

This work was done at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02478, USA.

An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), St. Louis, MO, 2009 [7].

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Correll, N., Arechiga, N., Bolger, A. et al. Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation. Intel Serv Robotics 3, 219–232 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-010-0076-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-010-0076-1

Keywords