Building a distributed robot garden

This paper describes the architecture and implementation of a distributed autonomous gardening system. The garden is a mesh network of robots and plants. The gardening robots are mobile manipulators with an eye-in-hand camera. They are capable of locating plants in the garden, watering them, and locating and grasping fruit. The plants are potted cherry tomatoes enhanced with sensors and computation to monitor their well-being (e.g. soil humidity, state of fruits) and with networking to communicate servicing requests to the robots. Task allocation, sensing and manipulation are distributed in the system and de-centrally coordinated. We describe the architecture of this system and present experimental results for navigation, object recognition and manipulation.Swiss National Science Foundation (PBEL2118737)Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) (SWARMS project W911NF-05-1-0219)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (IIS- 0426838)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (0735953)Intel CorporationMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Undergraduate Research Opportunities ProgramMIT Summer Research Program (MSRP