Mobile Ground-Truth 3D Detection Environment for Agricultural Robot Field Testing
Safety and performance validation of autonomous agricultural robots is critically dependent on realistic, mobile test environments that provide high-fidelity ground truth. Existing infrastructures focus on either component-level sensor evaluation in fixed setups or system-level black-box testing und...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2025-06-01
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| Series: | Sensors |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/25/13/4103 |
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| Summary: | Safety and performance validation of autonomous agricultural robots is critically dependent on realistic, mobile test environments that provide high-fidelity ground truth. Existing infrastructures focus on either component-level sensor evaluation in fixed setups or system-level black-box testing under constrained conditions, lacking true mobility, multi-object capability and tracking or detecting objects in multiple Degrees Of Freedom (DOFs) in unstructured fields. In this paper, we present a sensor station network designed to overcome these limitations. Our mobile testbed consists of self-powered stations, each equipped with a high-resolution 3D-Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) sensor, dual-antenna Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers and on-board edge computers. By synchronising over GNSS time and calibrating rigid LiDAR-to-LiDAR transformations, we fuse point clouds from multiple stations into a coherent geometric representation of a real agricultural environment, which we sample at up to 20 Hz. We demonstrate the performance of the system in field experiments with an autonomous robot traversing a 26,000 m<sup>2</sup> area at up to 20 km/h. Our results show continuous and consistent detections of the robot even at the field boundaries. This work will enable a comprehensive evaluation of geofencing and environmental perception capabilities, paving the way for safety and performance benchmarking of agricultural robot systems. |
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| ISSN: | 1424-8220 |