Legged Robots in the Agricultural Context: Analysing Their Traverse Capabilities and Performance

Mobile robots are widely used in agriculture, either as the form of intelligent vehicles or as monitoring platforms, where sensors are placed for the gathering of data. Overall, wheeled robots have play a crucial role in the development of new monitoring techniques, mainly due to their capabilities (their movements can resemble the ones of a tractor) or because of the wide variety found on the market. Nevertheless, another kind of mobile robots, known as legged robots, have not been explored yet in the agricultural context, specifically as platforms for data gathering and eventually, for interaction with the growing. In this work, we compare the capabilities of a legged robot against a wheeled one following previously published guidelines for performance evaluation of both kind of robots. In particular, we evaluate the odometry responses and the energy consumption of the robots when performing previously known manoeuvres. Moreover, considering that in the agricultural context is feasible to find different kind of terrains, we performed our evaluation under grass, gravel and pavement, both even and uneven terrains, for a circle-shaped, closed S-shaped and square-shaped, of different sizes. Overall, the legged robot showed a more uniform response in the power consumption behaviour despite the kind of terrain, but the wheeled robot showed better results from a localization perspective. The analysis provided herein serve as the basis for future usage of legged robots in the agricultural context.