COUNTRYBOTS

The project COUNTRYBOTS addresses the automatization and robotization of agricultural and livestock tasks, providing solutions for its monitoring and for the cooperative transport of goods in rural areas. We propose using multi-robot teams, that allow combining several aerial images of the working area taken from different viewpoints for better monitoring. In transport applications, multi-robot teams can deal with goods with larger payloads and more variability in their shape. Additionally, multi-robot systems extend the capabilities and efficiency of robots, allowing tasks to be carried out in parallel, improving robustness in the event of failures, and providing better scalability properties. It is an ambitious context, which contemplates static scenarios (crop monitoring), but also more challenging and highly dynamic environments (livestock monitoring, cooperative transport of deformable goods). Additionally, since rural areas usually have connectivity issues, multi-robot communication maintenance strategies are key. This requires to develop novel solutions for the perception and processing of visual data, considering deformable objects and highly dynamic environments, to propose specific methods of information exchange and sensor fusion, and to research on new multi-robot cooperation strategies to make the robots to perform coordinated motions to deploy to better observe the area, to cooperatively transport objects, and to collaborate for performing livestock fencing or herding tasks, as we propose in COUNTRYBOTS.