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Seeking guidance for autonomous navigation of agricultural rover.

Hi guys. Im currently working on an agricultural rover where in the function of the rover is to identify wether the plant detected by the camera mounted is a crop or a weed and hence eliminate the weed using high intensity laser if detected. The Design consists of a base rover and a robotic arm on top of the rover which has cameras attached to it for CV aspect.

I actually seek some guidance regarding the autonomous navigation of the rover. Im planning on using ROS for this. The main purpose is to navigate the rover without human interference (completely autonomous) on the agricultural terrain. If someone could please guide me as to how i can go about doing this, it would be helpful.

Thank You

Asked by Aditya_Anirudh on 2023-05-23 07:25:30 UTC

Comments

This appears to be a cross-post of Seeking Guidance for Autonomous Navigation of Agricultural Rover on ROS Discourse, and a prime example of why we don't like those: the discussion is now taking place simultaneously in two places.

Please do not cross-post like this.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2023-05-24 02:35:56 UTC

Answers

Hi you could begin taking a look at ROS Agriculture, to get some ideas and previous works: http://wiki.ros.org/agriculture

I am going to send you theme-related links:

  1. Challenges for ROS2 in Autonomous Agricultural Applications: https://vimeo.com/649646777
  2. https://www.theconstructsim.com/tag/ros-agriculture/

Regarding the navigation, you could use (and adjust the packages to fit your robot's model) navigations stacks, such as NAV2: https://navigation.ros.org/

Asked by Vini71 on 2023-05-23 14:14:06 UTC

Comments

Thanks for your reply. So we have two aspects to this project

1)Actuating the robotic arm on the rover. We have figured out the kinematic transformation matrices for the arm which is mounted on the rover and have also figured out its repeatable action

2)Navigation of the base rover, the aspect where I require help. We are going ahead with a design similar to that of the Husky robot from clearpath robotics. For now we are looking at getting the simulation through in our project, we are not looking at going ahead with a physical model for now since we are doing this as a college project. I was wondering wether we could use nav2 stack, where we could use a GPS sensor to create a map of the rover and then use SLAM for autonomous navigation. Any suggestions or improvements to the current idea from your side is absolutely welcome. I would be highly oblidged if I could get some guidance from your end. Please note that we are only looking at performing the simulation for now.

Thank you

Asked by Aditya_Anirudh on 2023-05-25 05:15:27 UTC

Understood, that sounds like an exciting project! My professor has extensive experience working with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles, specifically the Girona500 I-AUV. They frequently employ MoveIt for tasks involving robot arm manipulation and navigation. My suggestion would be to leverage MoveIt for the robotic arm operations and NAV2 for your navigation requirements. While it is possible to solely use MoveIt, be prepared to make significant adjustments to the package and code for seamless integration.

I'm attaching a couple of relevant links for your convenience:

MoveIt: https://moveit.picknik.ai/main/index.html Girona500 I-AUV: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/7906569 I hope this information proves useful in your project. Best of luck!

Asked by Vini71 on 2023-05-26 14:35:18 UTC