Bioresource and Agricultural Engineering Commons^™

Communications, Decision-Making, And Interactions Of A Multi-Agent Autonomous Vehicle System, Daniel Davis Smith

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Autonomous vehicles are becoming ever more common and offer many attractive benefits to society. They can operate for long periods of time unattended, operate in environments that may be dangerous to humans, perform time consuming or repetitive tasks and all with greater efficiency and lower costs than humans. For these vehicles to be able to do these things, algorithms need to be designed and optimized that allow them to interact with the real-world environment in safe, effective, and efficient ways.

We designed and built a set of three homogeneous water-based autonomous surface vehicles equipped with appropriate sensors and communications ability …

Lessons To Be Learned In Adoption Of Autonomous Equipment For Field Crops, James Lowenberg-Deboer, Karl Behrendt, Melf-Hinrich Ehlers, Carl R. Dillon, Andreas Gabriel, Iona Yuelu Huang, Ian Kumwenda, Tyler Mark, Andreas Meyer-Aurich, Gabor Milics, Kehinde Oluseyi Olagunju, Søren Marcus Pedersen, Jordan M. Shockley, David Rose

Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

Autonomous equipment for crop production is on the verge of technical and economic feasibility, but government regulation may slow its adoption. Key regulatory issues include requirements for on-site human supervision, liability for autonomous machine error, and intellectual property in robotic learning. As an example of the impact of regulation on the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment, analysis from the United Kingdom suggests that requiring 100% on-site human supervision almost wipes out the economic benefits of autonomous crop equipment for small and medium farms and increases the economies-of-scale advantage of larger farms.