title: A Multi-Robot Sense-Act Approach to Lead to a Proper Acting in Environmental Incidents.
abstract: Many environmental incidents affect large areas, often in rough terrain constrained by natural obstacles, which makes intervention difficult. New technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles, may help address this issue due to their suitability to reach and easily cover large areas. Thus, unmanned aerial vehicles may be used to inspect the terrain and make a first assessment of the affected areas; however, nowadays they do not have the capability to act. On the other hand, ground vehicles rely on enough power to perform the intervention but exhibit more mobility constraints. This paper proposes a multi-robot sense-act system, composed of aerial and ground vehicles. This combination allows performing autonomous tasks in large outdoor areas by integrating both types of platforms in a fully automated manner. Aerial units are used to easily obtain relevant data from the environment and ground units use this information to carry out interventions more efficiently. This paper describes the platforms and sensors required by this multi-robot sense-act system as well as proposes a software system to automatically handle the workflow for any generic environmental task. The proposed system has proved to be suitable to reduce the amount of herbicide applied in agricultural treatments. Although herbicides are very polluting, they are massively deployed on complete agricultural fields to remove weeds. Nevertheless, the amount of herbicide required for treatment is radically reduced when it is accurately applied on patches by the proposed multi-robot system. Thus, the aerial units were employed to scout the crop and build an accurate weed distribution map which was subsequently used to plan the task of the ground units. The whole workflow was executed in a fully autonomous way, without human intervention except when required by Spanish law due to safety reasons.
authors: Centre for Automation and Robotics, CSIC-UPM, Arganda del Rey, Madrid 28500, Spain. jesus.conesa@csic.es.
authors: Jesús
authors: J
authors: Conesa-Muñoz
authors: Centre for Automation and Robotics, UPM-CSIC, José Gutierrez Abascal 2, Madrid 28006, Spain. joao.valente@upm.es.|Department of Systems Engineering & Automation, Carlos III University, Av. Universidad 30, Leganés 28911, Spain. joao.valente@upm.es.
authors: João
authors: J
authors: Valente
authors: Centre for Automation and Robotics, UPM-CSIC, José Gutierrez Abascal 2, Madrid 28006, Spain. j.cerro@upm.es.
authors: Jaime
authors: J
authors: Del Cerro
authors: Centre for Automation and Robotics, UPM-CSIC, José Gutierrez Abascal 2, Madrid 28006, Spain. antonio.barrientos@upm.es.
authors: Antonio
authors: A
authors: Barrientos
authors: Centre for Automation and Robotics, CSIC-UPM, Arganda del Rey, Madrid 28500, Spain. angela.ribeiro@csic.es.
authors: Angela
authors: A
authors: Ribeiro
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D000401:Aircraft; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D006540:Herbicides; D006801:Humans; D057685:Plant Weeds; D012371:Robotics / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D059015:Wireless Technology
chemical_list: D006540:Herbicides
keywords: collaborative robots; mixed robot fleet; multi-robot sense-act system; precision agriculture; site-specific treatment