大規模マルチロボットによる牧草生育モニタリングのための間欠配置：データ合成・予測・計画
Intermittent Deployment for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Forage Perception: Data Synthesis, Prediction, and Planning
ROS Gazeboで合成した農業データから牧草地の時空間変化を予測するニューラルネットを構築し、その予測に基づく低コストな間欠的マルチロボット配置計画を提案した。
著者: Jun Liu, Murtaza Rangwala, Kulbir Singh Ahluwalia, Shayan Ghajar, Harnaik Singh Dhami, Pratap Tokekar, Benjamin F. Tracy, Ryan K. Williams
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Monitoring the health and vigor of grasslands is vital for informing management decisions to optimize rotational grazing in agriculture applications. To take advantage of forage resources and improve land productivity, we require knowledge of pastureland growth patterns that is simply unavailable at state of the art. In this paper, we propose to deploy a team of robots to monitor the evolution of an unknown pastureland environment to fulfill the above goal. To monitor such an environment, which usually evolves slowly, we need to design a strategy for rapid assessment of the environment over large areas at a low cost. Thus, we propose an integrated pipeline comprising of data synthesis, deep neural network training and prediction along with a multi-robot deployment algorithm that monitors pasturelands intermittently. Specifically, using expert-informed agricultural data coupled with novel data synthesis in ROS Gazebo, we first propose a new neural network architecture to learn the spatiotemporal dynamics of the environment. Such predictions help us to understand pastureland growth patterns on large scales and make appropriate monitoring decisions for the future. Based on our predictions, we then design an intermittent multi-robot deployment policy for low-cost monitoring. Finally, we compare the proposed pipeline with other methods, from data synthesis to prediction and planning, to corroborate our pipeline's performance.
