Towards an Architecture for Online Scheduling of Autonomous Robots in Agriculture: Open Issues

Towards an Architecture for Online Scheduling of Autonomous Robots in Agriculture: Open Issues

Bruno Bachelet, Pietro Battistoni, Sandro Bimonte, Christophe Cariou, Gérard Chalhoub, Fabien Coutarel, Nicolas Tricot
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/IJSVST.313059
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Abstract

Nowadays, we observe the development of autonomous robots for agricultural tasks. Farmers are becoming task and data managers with the emergence of advanced farm management information systems (FMISs). However, existing FMISs lack the tools for handling scheduling and monitoring of fleets of robots. The scheduling functionalities are essential for the growth of autonomous robot industry. It allows a better management to share these state of the art and expensive resources between multiple farmers, reducing the overall cost. Scheduling is always coupled with a re-scheduling process that allows to react to unexpected events. The re-scheduling process, called online scheduling, can only be made possible with a monitoring process that collects real-time information about the ongoing tasks and the state of robots. Finally, relatively little is known about the changes in farmers' activities as a result of the introduction of these robots. Acceptance of these new technologies is nevertheless essential to the performance of the systems. Motivated by the lack of a general framework for the online scheduling of autonomous robots for agriculture, the authors propose a conceptual framework for the scheduling and monitoring of such shared resources. All the needed building blocks for the whole conceptual framework to function efficiently are highlighted. Open issues related to each of these building blocks are discussed, from robotics auto-diagnosis to data management, wireless communication, scheduling, monitoring, and controlling these autonomous robots, keeping in the loop the human operator and his essential role in this system.
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Introduction

Nowadays, more and more agricultural machinery mount sensors for collecting ðne raw data (temperature, humidity, GPS, speed, etc.) in the ðeld. These data are then exploited by decision-making algorithms to improve agricultural technical operations such as labour, spreading, monitoring, scouting, etc. These data are usually integrated in a Farm Management Information System (FMIS), which has been deðned as a “planned system for collecting, processing, storing, and disseminating data in the form needed to carry out a farm’s operations and functions” (Sørensen et al., 2010). One major functionality of a FMIS is ”machinery management”, which ”includes the details of equipment usage, the average cost per hour per unit. It also includes ñeet management and logistics” (Fountas et al., 2015a). In addition, we are witnessing a signiðcant development of autonomous vehicles making it possible to carry out increasingly complex agricultural operations for environmental and social purposes such as chemicals reduction and painful jobs and accident reduction.

In this context, as stated by (Fountas et al., 2015b), the role of the farmer will move towards decision-making in order to monitor and manage tasks of autonomous robot ñeet (RF). In particular, the scheduling and recovery activities of a RF (S-RF) is a crucial functionality that must be offered by an FMIS. As described in (Sørensen et al., 2010b), S-RF in agriculture is strongly characterized by uncertainties due to contextual agricultural data such as weather, machine performance, obstacles present in plots, etc. Therefore, maximizing the efficiency of the equipment when small autonomous robots are present is a key issue for smart agriculture (Sørensen et al., 2010b). Several works have been proposed to handle the scheduling of agricultural equipment at different spatial scales from plot to farm, but contrary to other industrial activities (Rossit et al., 2019), few works take into account the recovery phase of the scheduling step (called online scheduling in (Sørensen et al., 2010b)). The seminal paper (Sørensen et al., 2010b) lists the requirements of a ñeet management system for agriculture and proposes a conceptual framework based on sensor networks. Authors in (Gonzalez-de Soto et al., 2014) also propose such kind of sensor-based conceptual framework for ñeet management.

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