Our paper entitled “Multi-camera GPS-free Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Strategy to Traverse Orchards” has been accepted for publication in the 11th European Conference on Mobile Robots. It took place in Coimbra, Portugal, from Sept 4th to 7th. We attended the conference and presented our works. The proposed article describes our vision-based approach for autonomous GPS-free navigation through orchards. It relies on a multi-camera perception system which feeds a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) scheme allowing to follow a reference path. This latter is based on a Voronoi diagram for the row traversals or a spiral model for the headland maneuvers, making it possible to deal with multiple orchard layouts. The method has been implemented on our robot and validated through experimentation conducted in the orchard belonging to the ‘Cité des Sciences Vertes‘ located in Auzeville Tolosane. A video showing this achievement can be seen hereafter. The paper can be downloaded here.
