Mission Planner for Agricultural Robotics

INTRODUCTION Introduction of autonomous robotic vehicles in an agricultural operation environment may potentially allow care and management of crops in ways that reduce the environmental impact, while increasing precision and efficiency (Earl et al., 2000; Kondo & Ting, 1998). Successful deployment of such vehicles requires the traditional field operation management process to be revisited. Managing autonomous field operations will require a planning framework detailing how the vehicles should drive and act to attain the mission goals. As a result, the traditional job-shop planning methodology must be supplemented with motion planning supported by software tools that allow an automated planning. In general, a dedicated pre-planning of the routes and tasks of the operation is shown to improve overall efficiency (Palmer et al., 2003).