Ground-Level Mapping and Navigating for Agriculture Based on IoT and Computer Vision

Autonomous agricultural systems are a promising solution to bridge the gap between labor shortage for agriculture tasks and the continuing needs for increasing productivity in agriculture. Automated mapping and navigation system will be a cornerstone of most autonomous agricultural system. Accordingly, we propose a ground-level mapping and navigating system based on computer vision technology (Mesh Simultaneous Localization and Mapping algorithm, Mesh-SLAM) and Internet of Things (IoT), to generate a 3D farm map on both the edge side and cloud. The innovation of this system includes three layers as sub-systems that are 1) ground-level robot vehicles' layer for conducting frames collection only with a monocular camera, 2) edge node layer for image feature data edge computing and communication, and 3) cloud layer for general management and deep computing. High efficiency and speed of mapping stage are enabled by making the robot vehicles directly stream continuous frames to their corresponding edge node. Then each edge node, that coordinate a certain range of robots, applies a new Mesh-SLAM frame by frame, whose core is reconstructing the features map by a mesh-based algorithm with scalable units and reduce the feature data size by a filtering algorithm. Additionally, the cloud-computing allows comprehensive arrangement and heavily deep computing. The system is scalable to larger-scale fields and more complex environment by taking advantage of dynamically distributing the computation power to edges. Our evaluation indicates that: 1) this Mesh-SLAM algorithm outperforms in mapping and localization precision, accuracy, and yield prediction error (resolution at centimeter); and 2) The scalability and flexibility of the IoT architecture make the system modularized, easy adding/removing new functional modules or IoT sensors. We conclude the trade-off between cost and performance widely augments the feasibility and practical implementation of this system in real farms.