R&D Project AGROBOTS

Full title: Scalable, efficient and decentralized coordination of automated agricultural vehicle fleets

Principal Investigator (PI): Marin Lujak

Collaborators (in alphabetical order by last name): 

• Prof. Holger Billhardt, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain),

• Prof. Alberto Fernandez, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain),

• Prof. Stefano Giordani, Università degli Studi di Roma "Tor Vergata" (Italy),

• Prof. Sascha Ossowski, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos (Spain),

• Prof. Rosaldo Rossetti, University of Oporto (Portugal),

• Prof. Frédéric Semet - École centrale de Lille, Deputy Director of CRIStAL -UMR CNRS 9189 (France),

• Prof. Elizabeth Sklar, Lincoln Institute for Agri-Food Technology, Research Director of the Lincoln Agri-Robotics centre (UK).

Researchers (in alphabetical order by last name):

• Jorge Gutiérrez Cejudo, PhD student in cotutelle with Prof. Stefano Giordani, University of Rome Tor Vergata (Italy),

• Aitor López Sánchez, PhD student in cotutelle with Prof. Frédéric Semet, Centrale Lille (France),

• Daniel Moreno París, MSc. in Robotics from Aalborg University, Denmark,

• António Manuel Ribeiro Pereira Da Costa, PhD student in cotutelle with Prof. Rosaldo Rossetti, University of Oporto (Portugal).

Supported by: Community of Madrid, Spain

Project overview

Agriculture faces a triple challenge: ensuring food production for the world's growing population, ensuring economic and environmental sustainability of farming practices, and making up for the lack of labor for hard, dangerous, and repetitive work. By ensuring precision and availability, agricultural robotics brings environment and productivity closer together.

However, scientific and technological developments related to agricultural robotics have mainly focused on a single robot. Very little work has been done on distributed, scalable and autonomous coordination and route guidance of a fleet of heterogeneous agricultural robots without a centralized coordination center while allowing for seamless dynamic change of the structure of the fleet and distributed and scalable adaptation in real time to the dynamically changing environment.

The AGROBOTS project aims to fill this void by proposing to develop a distributed multi-agent architecture for the coordination of a fleet of mobile agricultural robots. To this end, in this project, we focus on dynamic, scalable and distributed multi-agent solution methods for three-index assignment problem and the dynamic agriculture fleet vehicle routing problem in the context of agriculture robot fleets. This approach allows us to achieve autonomous real-time coordination of fleets of agricultural mobile robots and improve fleet performance and efficiency while minimizing dependence on human labor.

Project results

1. Lujak, M., Gutiérrez-Cejudo, J., Salvatore, A., Giordani, S., and Fernandez, A.: Static and Time-Extended 1-on-1 Multi-Agent Task Allocation with Implements and Limited Autonomy. 2024 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Kuching, Malaysia.  Accepted.

2. Lopez, A., Lujak, M.*, Semet, F., and Billhardt, H.: Capacitated Agriculture Fleet Vehicle Routing with Implements and Limited Autonomy: A model and a two-phase solution approach. 2024 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Kuching, Malaysia.  Submitted.

3. Ribeiro da Costa, A., Moreno París, D., Lujak, M.*,  F. Rossetti, R.J., and Kokkinogenis, Z.: Dynamic and Cooperative Multi-Agent Task Allocation: Enhancing Nash Equilibrium through Learning. 2024 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), Kuching, Malaysia.  Accepted.

4. Gutiérrez-Cejudo, J., Enguix-Andrés, F., Carrascosa, C.,  Rebollo, M., Fernandez, A.: Demo of the Agri-RO5 architecture for Agrirobot Fleet Simulation.  22nd International Conference on Practical applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (PAAMS 2024). University of Salamanca (Spain). 26th-28th June, 2024. Accepted.

5. Lopez, A., Lujak, M., Semet, F., and Billhardt, H.: Dynamic, Fair, and Efficient Routing for Cooperative Autonomous Vehicle Fleets. Expert Systems with Applications, Elsevier (2024). Vol. 251, 1 October 2024, 123964. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eswa.2024.123964 [ View PDF ] 

6. A. López Sánchez, F. Semet, M. Lujak and H. Billhardt: Agricultural fleet vehicle routing problem with implements. Odysseus 2024, the 9th International Workshop on Freight Transportation and Logistics. Carmona (Spain) May 19-24, 2024. Accepted. 

7. Cejudo, J.G.; Andrés, F.E.; Lujak, M.*; Casamayor, C.C.; Fernandez, A.; López, L.H. Towards Agrirobot Digital Twins: Agri-RO5 — A Multi-Agent Architecture for Dynamic Fleet Simulation. Electronics 2024, 13, 80. DOI: 10.3390/electronics13010080

8. Lujak, M.*, Salvatore, A., Fernández, A., Giordani, S., and Cousy, K.: How to Fairly and Efficiently Assign Tasks in Individually Rational Agents’ Coalitions? Models and Fairness Measures.  Computer Science and Information Systems (ComSIS). Vol. 21(1), pp. 269-289 DOI: 10.2298/CSIS230119075L (2023). [link]

9. Lujak, M.*, Fernández, A., Billhardt, H., Ossowski, S., Arias Herrero J., and López Sánchez, A.: On value-aligned cooperative multi-agent task allocation. Workshop on Value Engineering in AI (VALE@ECAI2023), LNCS. In Press. (2024)

10. Lopez, A., Lujak, M.*, Semet, F., and Billhardt, H.: Vehicle Routing Problem with Fair Profits and Time Windows (VRP-FPTW). In Proc. of 2023 IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), pp. 1-7. Oct. 1-4, 2023, Hawaii, USA.  DOI: 10.1109/SMC53992.2023.10394012 (2023) [link]

11. Lopez, A., Lujak, M.*, Semet, F., and Billhardt, H.: How to achieve fair and efficient cooperative vehicle routing? AI Communications,vol. 37, no. 2, pp. 223-245, 2024 (IOS Press). DOI: 10.3233/AIC-220315 (2023). [link]

12. Gutiérrez-Cejudo, J., Lujak, M.*, Fernández, A. (2023). Agrobots Architecture and Agrobots-Sim Simulator for Dynamic Agri-Robot Coordination. In: Durães, D., González-Briones, A., Lujak, M., El Bolock, A., Carneiro, J. (eds) Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Cognitive Mimetics. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1838. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-37593-4_1 [link]

13. Cousy, K., Lujak, M.*, Salvatore, A., Fernández, A., and Giordani, S. (2022). On Balancing Fairness and Efficiency of Task Assignment in Agent Societies. In: González-Briones, A. et al. Highlights in Practical Applications of Agents, Multi-Agent Systems, and Complex Systems Simulation. The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2022. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1678. Springer, Cham. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-18697-4_8  [link]

14. Lopez, A., Lujak, M.*, Semet, F., and Billhardt, H.: On balancing fairness and efficiency in routing of cooperative vehicle fleets. ATT 2022 @ IJCAI 2022. CEUR proceedings vol. 3173, pp. 62-76 (2022).  [pdf]  

15. Lujak, M.*, Sklar, E., and Semet, F.: Agriculture Fleet Vehicle Routing: A Decentralised and Dynamic Problem. AI Communications, vol. 34, no. 1, pp. 55-71, 2021, IOS Press [link] [pdf]