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Towards a Reliable Robot for Steep Slope Vineyards Monitoring

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Abstract

Develop ground robots for crop monitoring and harvesting in steep slope vineyards is a complex challenge. Because of two main reasons: harsh condition of the terrain and unstable localization accuracy got from Global Positioning Systems (GPS). This paper presents a hybrid SLAM (VineSLAM) considering low cost landmarks to increase the robot localization accuracy, robustness and redundancy on these steep slope vineyards. Also, we present a cost-effective robot to carry-out crop monitoring tasks in steep slope vineyard environment. Test results got in a simulated and in a real test case supports the proposed approach and robot.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. INESC TEC - INESC Technology and Science (formerly INESC Porto), Porto, Portugal

    Filipe Neves dos Santos, Heber Sobreira, Daniel Campos, Raul Morais & António Paulo Moreira

  2. Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Filipe Neves dos Santos, Heber Sobreira, Daniel Campos & António Paulo Moreira

  3. Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, UTAD, Vila Real, Portugal

    Raul Morais

  4. Instituto Politcnico de Viseu, ESTGV, Viseu, Portugal

    Olga Contente

Authors
  1. Filipe Neves dos Santos
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  2. Heber Sobreira
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  3. Daniel Campos
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  4. Raul Morais
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  5. António Paulo Moreira
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  6. Olga Contente
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Correspondence to Filipe Neves dos Santos.

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dos Santos, F.N., Sobreira, H., Campos, D. et al. Towards a Reliable Robot for Steep Slope Vineyards Monitoring. J Intell Robot Syst 83, 429–444 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-016-0340-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-016-0340-5

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