Autonomous navigation algorithms aim at providing mobile robots with efficient planning and control policies to go through cluttered and dynamic environments. Advanced autonomous navigation systems have been explored to improve planners' and controllers' robustness, reliability, and computational efficiency in real-world applications. In the last decade, learning methods have seen a tremendous success among robotics researchers, motivating an increasing collection of innovative works which adopt Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) for general autonomous navigation [1], socially aware path planning [2], and agile aerial vehicles autopilot [3]. Besides the most common paradigm of sensorimotor agents or local planners, learning agents can be successfully mixed up in alternative ways with the navigation system. Recent works proposed hybrid solutions to optimize classic planners like the Dynamic Window Approach (DWA) [4]. Moreover, [5, 6] recently showed the effectiveness of the planner's parameters learning approach compared to end-to-end policy learning, resulting in an adaptive optimized planner.

The development of precision agriculture has gradually introduced automation in the agricultural process to support and rationalize all the activities related to field management. In particular, service robotics plays a predominant role in this evolution by deploying autonomous agents able to navigate in fields while executing different tasks without the need for human intervention, such as monitoring, spraying and harvesting. In this context, global path planning is the first necessary step for every robotic mission and ensures that the navigation is performed efficiently and with complete field coverage. In this paper, we propose a learning-based approach to tackle waypoint generation for planning a navigation path for row-based crops, starting from a top-view map of the region-of-interest. We present a novel methodology for waypoint clustering based on a contrastive loss, able to project the points to a separable latent space. The proposed deep neural network can simultaneously predict the waypoint position and cluster assignment with two specialized heads in a single forward pass. The extensive experimentation on simulated and real-world images demonstrates that the proposed approach effectively solves the waypoint generation problem for both straight and curved row-based crops, overcoming the limitations of previous state-of-the-art methodologies.

Expensive sensors and inefficient algorithmic pipelines significantly affect the overall cost of autonomous machines. However, affordable robotic solutions are essential to practical usage, and their financial impact constitutes a fundamental requirement to employ service robotics in most fields of application. Among all, researchers in the precision agriculture domain strive to devise robust and cost-effective autonomous platforms in order to provide genuinely large-scale competitive solutions. In this article, we present a complete algorithmic pipeline for row-based crops autonomous navigation, specifically designed to cope with low-range sensors and seasonal variations. Firstly, we build on a robust data-driven methodology to generate a viable path for the autonomous machine, covering the full extension of the crop with only the occupancy grid map information of the field. Moreover, our solution leverages on latest advancement of deep learning optimization techniques and synthetic generation of data to provide an affordable solution that efficiently tackles the well-known Global Navigation Satellite System unreliability and degradation due to vegetation growing inside rows. Extensive experimentation and simulations against computer-generated environments and real-world crops demonstrated the robustness and intrinsic generalizability of our methodology that opens the possibility of highly affordable and fully autonomous machines.

Precision agriculture is a fast-growing field that aims at introducing affordable and effective automation into agricultural processes. Nowadays, algorithmic solutions for navigation in vineyards require expensive sensors and high computational workloads that preclude large-scale applicability of autonomous robotic platforms in real business case scenarios. From this perspective, our novel proposed control leverages the latest advancement in machine perception and edge AI techniques to achieve highly affordable and reliable navigation inside vineyard rows with low computational and power consumption. Indeed, using a custom-trained segmentation network and a low-range RGB-D camera, we are able to take advantage of the semantic information of the environment to produce smooth trajectories and stable control in different vineyards scenarios. Moreover, the segmentation maps generated by the control algorithm itself could be directly exploited as filters for a vegetative assessment of the crop status. Extensive experimentations and evaluations against real-world data and simulated environments demonstrated the effectiveness and intrinsic robustness of our methodology.