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Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

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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.

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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
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  2. Nikos Arechiga
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  3. Adrienne Bolger
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  4. Mario Bollini
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  5. Ben Charrow
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  6. Adam Clayton
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  7. Felipe Dominguez
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  8. Kenneth Donahue
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  9. Samuel Dyar
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  10. Luke Johnson
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  11. Huan Liu
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  12. Alexander Patrikalakis
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  13. Timothy Robertson
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  14. Jeremy Smith
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  15. Daniel Soltero
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  16. Melissa Tanner
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  17. Lauren White
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  18. Daniela Rus
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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].

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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

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

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