Agricultural weed control by a swarm of robots: field decomposition and workload distribution

Herbicide application in agriculture is an effective means of combating weeds. The weed control problem can be solved with a fully autonomous precision spraying robot. In order to decrease the time spent on herbicide application, a swarm robotic solution using the AX-1 robot has been developed. The solution involves field decomposition, workload distribution, and path-planning. The results show that increasing the number of robots in the swarm reduces the time spent in the field for all fields tested regardless of size and complexity. However, the results point to distance alone being insufficient as a sole criterion for workload distribution, prompting future research to investigate how to gather a weed density distribution before performing workload distribution.