A Behaviour Based Hierarchical Fuzzy Control Architecture for Agricultural Autonomous Mobile Robots

This paper describes the design and implementation of a real-time autonomous mobile robot aimed at navigating in real farms with no operator intervention. The agricultural environment being targeted consists of an irregular terrain supporting crops or sparsely populated with objects which gives rise to complex problems of identification, monitoring and control. In this paper we introduce a fuzzy hierarchical controller for such agricultural robots. The controller utilises co-operating behaviours (obstacle avoidance, edge following, goal seeking) to navigate in tight spaces and navigate towards its target (bales of hay, boxes of fruit/vegetables). It can also be used to follow crop edge (for purposes of crop cultivation, irrigation, etc.). The work advances the subject by providing a novel hierarchical architecture that simplifies fuzzy controller design and provides a control architecture with a fast response, robust performance, and the ability to deal with dynamic outdoor environments.