Autonomous Robotic Platform for Precision Orchard Management: Architecture and Software Perspective

We present an autonomous ground robotic platform for agriculture application. The design is specifically targeted for small/medium farms with orchards and in this paper we propose a new vehicle concept as well as the sensor suite and software architecture to accomplish the implementation of the navigation algorithm designed to autonomously operate within the rows of an orchard. In this context, we also show how to exploit the structure of the orchard to optimize the Hough Transform algorithm to detect tree rows. Simulations and experimental results are presented.