# Assisting humans by transferring skills to the robot in remote-controlled vertical farming

Alexis Boulay

► To cite this version:

Alexis Boulay. Assisting humans by transferring skills to the robot in remote-controlled vertical farming. JJCR 2022 - Journée des Jeunes Chercheurs en Robotique, Nov 2022, Paris, France. hal-03885115

HAL Id: hal-03885115

https://inria.hal.science/hal-03885115

Submitted on 5 Dec 2022

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# Assisting humans by transferring skills to the robot in remote-controlled vertical farming

Alexis Boulay, 1st year CIFRE PhD student with Farm3

Inria supervisors : David Daney, Margot Vulliez
Auctus Inria, F-33405 Talence, France

Farm3 supervisors : Romain Schmitt, Christopher Calif
Farm3, F-25300 Verrières-de-Joux, France

contact : alexis.boulay@inria.fr

## Goal

In a concern of local production and frugality in the consumption of resources, **indoor farming** provides an interesting solution. Moreover, this type of farming commonly use climate control, with the use of **vertical farming**, this leads to generate an optimal microclimate to grow any kind of plant. In this type of highly controlled environment, human presence could disrupt the stability, except that in such a living environment **human expertise** is mandatory.
The aim of this thesis is to keep human expertise via the use of **teleoperated robot** and **co-control methods**.

**How to design a co-control methods that allow to keep human expertise and help operator accomplishing tasks ?**

## Tasks analysis

How to describe a task in order to reproduce it with a robot ?

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

Break down task

<figure><img src="image_4.png" /></figure>

Label task

<figure><img src="image_5.png" /></figure>

Give hardware and control requirement.

<figure><img src="image_6.png" /></figure>

Indicate needed information.

## Sharing autonomy

How to assist human while preserving its position as an expert decision-maker ?

<figure><img src="image_7.png" /></figure>

Taking over simple tasks

<figure><img src="image_8.png" /></figure>

Use of visual and
haptic interface

<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>

Easy to supervise and
teleoperate

<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>

Exchange information

<figure><img src="image_11.png" /></figure>

Keep human expertise.

<figure><img src="image_12.png" /></figure>

Improve operator comfort.

## Skills transfer

How to improve robot assistant skills ?

<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

Data acquisition
through teleoperation

<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

Establish dataset
based on task analysis

<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>

Set up data acquisition routine.

<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>

Increase robot autonomy.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Global view of proposed system</figcaption></figure>

## Co-control

Co-control consists of human-robot collaboration to reach a goal. The whole question is in the **arbitration**, or which weight to give to both autonomous and operator consign in a final co-consign. Also, it is about given the **authority** to the operator or the robot depending on the **task** and the exchanged **information**.

<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Proposed co-control diagram</figcaption></figure>

## Farm3

This PhD thesis is part of a partnership between the Auctus team at **INRIA** and the company **Farm3**.
Farm3 is a French start-up specialized in soil-less and aeroponic vertical cultivation in controlled climate. To that purpose, they made the FarmCube, a vertical farm of 12 square meters, that can host up to 5000 plants.

In this way, vertical farming as experiment in the FarmCube represent the ideal **sensitive dynamic environment** that require a telerobotic system based on shared autonomy.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Picture of the FarmCube</figcaption></figure>