SAGA - Swarm robotics for agricultural applications

Robotics is expected to play a major role in the agricultural/farming domain, and often multi-robot systems and collaborative approaches are mentioned as potential solutions to improve efficiency and system robustness. Swarm robotics, in particular, stresses aspects like flexibility, scalability and robustness in solving complex tasks, and is considered extremely relevant for precision farming and large-scale agricultural applications. However, swarm robotics research is still confined into the lab, and no application in the field is currently available. With this experiment, we will demonstrate for the first time the application of swarm robotics principles to the agricultural domain. Specifically, we target a decentralised monitoring/mapping scenario, and implement a use case for the detection and mapping of volunteer potatoes in sugar beet fields by a group of small unmanned aerial vehicles.