A Distributed Multirobot Architecture for Decoupled Inspection and Localized Treatment in Precision Agriculture

This work presents a distributed multirobot architecture for autonomous inspection and precision treatment in agriculture, validated under real vineyard conditions. The proposed system integrates a heterogeneous fleet of four specialized ground robots (two inspection and two treatment platforms), coordinated through a cloud‐based mission control center (MCC). The MCC acts as the cognitive layer of the system, integrating CNN‐based disease detection, mission planning, and fleet management, while the robotic platforms operate as autonomous agents responsible for sensing and actuation. Inspection and treatment processes are separated through an event‐driven, grid‐based coordination mechanism maintained by the MCC, enabling asynchronous and independent operation of both robot types without direct inter‐robot communication. Georeferenced images acquired by the inspection robots are transmitted in real time to the MCC, where the disease detection model identifies affected areas and updates the treatment grid accordingly. Experimental validation in a commercial vineyard demonstrated the feasibility of the approach: the model achieved a recall of 95.2% against expert annotations at a 16% infection prevalence, no data losses were recorded across communication streams, and 21.1% of acquired images generated treatment events. The proposed architecture is not tied to a specific task and can be extended to other precision agriculture scenarios.