Perception-Driven Shared Control Architecture for Agricultural Robots Performing Harvesting Tasks

This paper introduces a shared control framework designed specifically for agricultural mobile manipulators en- gaged in harvesting operations. The shared control strategy allows for achieving such operations by dynamically exchanging the control between the robotic system and a human operator depending on the uncertainty in the environment perception. For this purpose, the robot’s behavior is dynamically adapted to switch between two control modes with a different level of autonomy of the robot. The level of autonomy is encoded in two different admittance behaviors which are included in a first-order Hierarchical Quadratic Programming (HQP) control framework, that allows the robot to simultaneously address other control objectives at the same time. Experimental results with a dual-arm mobile robot, developed as part of the EU- funded CANOPIES project, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in real conditions.