Agricultural robots or agribots are changing the look, feel and pace of traditional farming practices. In this talk, I will talk about recent applications of multirobot systems/autonomous vehicular fleets in agriculture. First, I will present control and planning techniques for multirobot systems deployed for preventing agricultural espionage in farmlands. Next, I will talk about scheduling and planning techniques for autonomous vehicular fleets in refill scheduling problems. Finally, I will conclude with opportunistic sensing and path planning problems for multi-robot systems that arise in ground robot-based high-throughput plant phenotyping applications.

Bio:

Sourabh Bhattacharya received his MS in Electrical Engineering, MA in Applied Mathematics, and PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After a postdoc at Coordinated Science Lab at UIUC, he joined the faculty of Iowa State University in the department of Mechanical Engineering. His research interests are in control and motion planning for multi-robot systems.