Development of Relay-Based Control System for a Robot Swarm Used for Agricultural Operations

Abstract

Introduction. Agriculture requires efficient processing of large land areas (fields, orchards, pastures). The use of distributed swarm robotics systems allows automating these processes, reducing labor costs and increasing the precision of operations. The efficiency of these systems largely depends on the control methods ensuring coordination of robots, optimal task distribution, and reliable communication between them that is critical for parallel processing and minimizing downtime.Aim of the Study. The study is aimed at improving the robot swarm control efficiency by developing an advanced method with the use of relay communication and a distributed ledger.Materials and Methods. The object of the study was a swarm robotics system for processing agricultural areal objects. The study was conducted using a software model implemented in Python, which simulated the operation of a robot swarm with relay-based communication. At the first stage, there was implemented an improved control method involving a distributed ledger of processed targets and a mechanism for dynamic role redistribution among robots. At the second stage, the system operation was simulated using a set of synthetic test tasks with varying sizes of the objects processed and different robot numbers in the swarm. At the final stage, the improved method was compared with baseline control method terms of task execution time, followed by a statistical evaluation of the obtained results.Results. There has been developed an improved robot swarm control method with a relay-based communication involving a distributed ledger of processed objects and a mechanism for dynamic redistribution of roles among robots. The simulation results demonstrated a 5.75% reduction in the average time of execution of full set of test tasks compared to the base approach. For performing the subset of tasks when the proposed method can realize fully its advantages, the reduction in processing time reaches 10.34%.Conclusion. The improved robot swarm control method enables more effective task distribution and an increased degree of parallelism in processing. This has high practical significance for application in agricultural robotic systems, especially when using budget-friendly equipment. The development prospects include adaptive control, integration with other optimization methods, and the expansion of the approach to heterogeneous swarms.