Agricultural Field Monitoring Using a Small Robot

Abstract

Site-specific weed control is critically dependent on continuously updated information on the conditions of the weed occurrence in the field. This fact has generated the idea of considering monitoring as a separate operation. Moreover, economical, environmental and sustainability criteria has lead to the idea of using inexpensive autonomous platforms, equipped with computer vision systems. Such a system can potentially increase the farmer's knowledge on the state of the field and consequently, improve the potential for timely and site-specific treatment of the field. In this paper, operational aspects concerning the field monitoring operation executed by a small robot are presented. A brief description of the hardware systems and the software architecture of the robot (called Hortibot) is given and the mission and route planning aspects of its high level control are analysed. These include the automated field representation and route planning methods for full area coverage as well as for sample-based monitoring operations.