Perception, Mapping and Planning for Autonomous Indoor Cart Pullers in Plant Nurseries and Greenhouses

The project revolves around automation in nursery farms and greenhouses. The goal is to deliver planted pots using autonomous unmanned systems. Planted pots will be loaded/unloaded to/from plant carts using a small robot called BigTop, designed and developed at the supporting organization, AIS. Motion planning, control, and navigation algorithms will be developed through this project for a mother vehicle, equipped with a myriad of on board sensors, to move plant carts to their goal position in the nursery farms/greenhouse without any human intervention. Neither loading/unloading planted pots to/from plant carts, nor docking of the mother vehicle to the plan carts would be studied in this project.
On board sensors will be used to generate a digital incremental map of the environment, as new information about the environment become available, to localize the cart-puller vehicle inside this map, and to plan efficient, and safe motion plans within this environment fully autonomously.

Faculty Supervisor:

Mehran Mehrandezh;Kamal Gupta;Homayoun Najjaran;Homayoun Najjaran;Mehran Mehrandezh

Student:

Partner:

Advanced Intelligent Systems

Discipline:

Engineering

Sector:

Agriculture; Information and cultural industries; Professional, scientific and technical services

University:

Simon Fraser University; The University of British Columbia - Okanagan; University of Regina

Program: