Autonomous Navigation with Open Software Platform for Field Robots.

In this chapter, we present an autonomous monitoring robot platform for agricultural farms and fields that is built using low-cost off-the-shelf hardware and open source software so as to be affordable for farmers. We provide a review of the current state of the art in autonomous agricultural robots and summarize the challenges that they must overcome. Our work comprises two main components: (1) the system architecture and hardware selected for a fully autonomous agricultural robot platform for automated monitoring and intervention tasks, and (2) the sensor fusion, local planning, and navigation software based on the Robot Operating System (ROS) framework with inclusion of design details and testing results. The challenges faced, solutions tested, and successes achieved with respect to the hardware and software architectures for this robot are presented in the interest of guiding future solutions for autonomous agricultural navigation and planning. We evaluate our approaches in outdoor farm field environments as well as indoor environments serving as an analogue for greenhouse navigation, and show how the properties of the environment affect the accuracy of the mapping and localisation tasks.