Evolutionary Greenhouse Layout Optimization for Rapid and Safe Robot Navigation

Daniel Dooyum Uyeh, Fitria Wulandari Ramlan, Rammohan Mallipeddi, Tusan Park, Seungmin Woo, Junhee Kim, Yeongsu Kim, Yushin Ha

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

15 Scopus citations

Abstract

There has been a rapid increase in demand for premium and safe agricultural products. Protected systems, such as greenhouses, are being adopted to meet demand. Ease in environmental regulation required for optimal plant growth is one of the advantages of protected systems. However, drawbacks such as poor ventilation in greenhouses can be fatal to the human workforce. This has led to the development of robots for hazardous tasks. Considering mobile robots are required to navigate down every aisle to perform a task in a greenhouse, and it is difficult to predict at which point the robot will need to return to the start point, to offload or refill for transportation and spraying schedules, respectively or battery charges. It will be commercially constraining to manufacture robots for every greenhouse specification. Efficient navigation can be done through path planning or layout design. In this paper, the greenhouse layout optimization problem was formulated to find optimal points on each bed to create an access path that would enable a reduction in the total travel time from all points in the greenhouse to the base point. The optimization problem was solved using differential evolution (DE), an evolutionary algorithm. Furthermore, we considered: 1) required space for inter-bed and rotary robot navigation; 2) standard bed specification; 3) area of the greenhouse; and 4) base point for starting and terminating navigation. The applicability of the proposed method was demonstrated by carrying out the experimental simulations on several greenhouse sizes.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8754747
Pages (from-to)88472-88480
Number of pages9
JournalIEEE Access
Volume7
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019

Keywords

  • Differential evolution
  • greenhouse
  • layout optimization
  • rapid and safe navigation
  • robots

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