Structured Ecological Cultivation with Autonomous Robots in Indoor Agriculture

A robotic system for indoor organic farming is presented in this paper. The system consists of heterogeneous robot agents with specific abilities, able to execute certain tasks only when working together, namely, an unmanned aerial robot (UAV), unmanned ground robots (UGV), and a compliant multi degree of freedom dual arm manipulator. The compliant manipulator, responsible for the delicate task of plant treatment, is developed within the Soft robotics paradigm. Using the Soft robotics principles, a dexterous human like motion can be achieved through the simultaneous deployment of Soft robot body parts, compliant control, and tactile sensing capabilities of the manipulator. Testing the robots on the described challenging application represents an interesting research opportunity in the rapidly expanding research field of Soft robotics. Coupled with high level mission planning and safe human robot collaboration, this framework has the capacity to change and automate traditional farming techniques.