Indoor robot gardening: design and implementation

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system with applications in urban/indoor precision agriculture. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. By embedding sensing, computation and communication into the pots, task allocation in the system is de-centrally coordinated, which makes the system scalable and robust against the failure of a centralized agent. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition and manipulation as well as challenges that This work was done at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02478, USA. Corresponding author [email protected] An abbreviated version of this paper was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), St. Louis, MO, 2009, (Correll et al 2009).