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Service robotics is recently enhancing precision agriculture enabling many automated processes based on efficient autonomous navigation solutions. However, data generation and infield validation campaigns hinder the progress of large-scale autonomous platforms. Simulated environments and deep visual perception are spreading as successful tools to speed up the development of robust navigation with low-cost RGB-D cameras. In this context, the contribution of this work is twofold: a synthetic dataset to train deep semantic segmentation networks together with a collection of virtual scenarios for a fast evaluation of navigation algorithms. Moreover, an automatic parametric approach is developed to explore different field geometries and features. The simulation framework and the dataset have been evaluated by training a deep segmentation network on different crops and benchmarking the resulting navigation., Accepted at the 14th European Conference on Precision Agriculture (ECPA) 2023

Robot assistants are emerging as high-tech solutions to support people in everyday life. Following and assisting the user in the domestic environment requires flexible mobility to safely move in cluttered spaces. We introduce a new approach to person following for assistance and monitoring. Our methodology exploits an omnidirectional robotic platform to detach the computation of linear and angular velocities and navigate within the domestic environment without losing track of the assisted person. While linear velocities are managed by a conventional Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) local planner, we trained a Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) agent to predict optimized angular velocities commands and maintain the orientation of the robot towards the user. We evaluate our navigation system on a real omnidirectional platform in various indoor scenarios, demonstrating the competitive advantage of our solution compared to a standard differential steering following.

Segmentation-based autonomous navigation has recently been proposed as a promising methodology to guide robotic platforms through crop rows without requiring precise GPS localization. However, existing methods are limited to scenarios where the centre of the row can be identified thanks to the sharp distinction between the plants and the sky. However, GPS signal obstruction mainly occurs in the case of tall, dense vegetation, such as high tree rows and orchards. In this work, we extend the segmentation-based robotic guidance to those scenarios where canopies and branches occlude the sky and hinder the usage of GPS and previous methods, increasing the overall robustness and adaptability of the control algorithm. Extensive experimentation on several realistic simulated tree fields and vineyards demonstrates the competitive advantages of the proposed solution.

Modern robotic platforms need a reliable localization system to operate daily beside humans. Simple pose estimation algorithms based on filtered wheel and inertial odometry often fail in the presence of abrupt kinematic changes and wheel slips. Moreover, despite the recent success of visual odometry, service and assistive robotic tasks often present challenging environmental conditions where visual-based solutions fail due to poor lighting or repetitive feature patterns. In this work, we propose an innovative online learning approach for wheel odometry correction, paving the way for a robust multi-source localization system. An efficient attention-based neural network architecture has been studied to combine precise performances with real-time inference. The proposed solution shows remarkable results compared to a standard neural network and filter-based odometry correction algorithms. Nonetheless, the online learning paradigm avoids the time-consuming data collection procedure and can be adopted on a generic robotic platform on-the-fly.

In recent years, precision agriculture has gradually oriented farming closer to automation processes to support all the activities related to field management. Service robotics plays a predominant role in this evolution by deploying autonomous agents that can navigate fields while performing tasks without human intervention, such as monitoring, spraying, and harvesting. To execute these precise actions, mobile robots need a real-time perception system that understands their surroundings and identifies their targets in the wild. Generalizing to new crops and environmental conditions is critical for practical applications, as labeled samples are rarely available. In this paper, we investigate the problem of crop segmentation and propose a novel approach to enhance domain generalization using knowledge distillation. In the proposed framework, we transfer knowledge from an ensemble of models individually trained on source domains to a student model that can adapt to unseen target domains. To evaluate the proposed method, we present a synthetic multi-domain dataset for crop segmentation containing plants of variegate shapes and covering different terrain styles, weather conditions, and light scenarios for more than 50,000 samples. We demonstrate significant improvements in performance over state-of-the-art methods. Our approach provides a promising solution for domain generalization in crop segmentation and has the potential to enhance precision agriculture applications.

Learning agents can optimize standard autonomous navigation improving flexibility, efficiency, and computational cost of the system by adopting a wide variety of approaches. This work introduces the \textit{PIC4rl-gym}, a fundamental modular framework to enhance navigation and learning research by mixing ROS2 and Gazebo, the standard tools of the robotics community, with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). The paper describes the whole structure of the PIC4rl-gym, which fully integrates DRL agent's training and testing in several indoor and outdoor navigation scenarios and tasks. A modular approach is adopted to easily customize the simulation by selecting new platforms, sensors, or models. We demonstrate the potential of our novel gym by benchmarking the resulting policies, trained for different navigation tasks, with a complete set of metrics.