The Distributed Robotic Garden, Distributed Robotics Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

The Distributed Robotic Garden emerged out of a summer project at the Distributed Robotic Laboratory, CSAIL, MIT in Summer 2008 and has been developed by Nikolaus Correll and Daniela Rus.

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This video shows the results obtained during a class concerned with building an autonomous gardening system taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during winter 2008.

Students implemented path-planning, inverse kinematics, object recognition, and visual servoing algorithms on six modified iRobot Create platform that were networked with each other and Linux routers installed on the plants.

The routers monitor the plant's humidity and store information about fruit location generated by the robots. In case the plant needs service, e.g. watering, or has a fruit ready to be picked, the router offers this task to the robots that bid for it using a market-based algorithm.

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This is the Distributed Robotic Garden project for the Distributed Robotics Group, led by Professor Daniela Rus, at CSAIL, MIT. This project consists of multiple robots interacting with each other and with intelligent pots to take care of the plants. The robots can water the plant, do a plant inventory and harvest. The image processing and arm control was done by Daniel Soltero, with open source softwares SwisTrack and ROS. The navigation system was done by Nikos Arechiga. This project was directly supervised by Dr. Nikolaus Correll.
The inventory task consists of a systematic scan of the plant, recording the description of each tomato when detected. The harvesting tasks consists of selecting a previously detected tomato from the inventory, based on percentages, and using image Jacobians to servo the arm.
The complete description is found in:

N. Correll, et al. "Building a Distributed Robot Garden." In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2009, St. Louis, MO.

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The Robot Garden is a system that functions as a visual embodiment of distributed algorithms, as well as an aesthetically appealing way to get more young students, and particularly girls, interested in programming.

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