A HARMS-based heterogeneous human-robot team for gathering and collecting

Agriculture production is a critical human intensive task, which takes place in all regions of the world. The process to grow and harvest crops is labor intensive in many countries due to the lack of automation and advanced technology. Much of the difficult, dangerous and dirty labor of crop production can be automated with intelligent and robotic platforms. We propose an intelligent, agent-oriented robotic team, which can enable the process of harvesting, gathering and collecting crops and fruits, of many types, from agricultural fields. This paper describes a novel robotic organization enabling humans, robots and agents to work together for automation of gathering and collection functions. The focus of the research is a model, called HARMS, which can enable Humans, software Agents, Robots, Machines and Sensors to work together indistinguishably. With this model, any capability-based human-like organization can be conceived and modeled, such as in manufacturing or agriculture. In this research, we model, design and implement a technology application of knowledge-based robot-to-robot and human-to-robot collaboration for an agricultural gathering and collection function. The gathering and collection functions were chosen as they are some of the most labor intensive and least automated processes in the process acquisition of agricultural products. The use of robotic organizations can reduce human labor and increase efficiency allowing people to focus on higher level tasks and minimizing the backbreaking tasks of agricultural production in the future. In this work, the HARMS model was applied to three different robotic instances and an integrated test was completed with satisfactory results that show the basic promise of this research.