International Test Service Offer to assess safety performances of agricultural robotic solutions
The pitch will present first versions of ARPA’s Test Protocols (ARPA for Agricultural Robot Performance Assessment) developed by INRAE in the AgROBOfood DIH. Three protocols in relationship with safety issues pointed in the ISO 18497-2018 are currently available towards Manufacturers and OEM suppliers of agricultural robotic solutions.
By
Philippe HERITIER – AgroTechnoPôle – INRAE-TSCF, Clermont-Ferrand (France)
Dieumet DENIS – AgroTechnoPôle – SHERPA-Engineering, Clermont-Ferrand (France)
Okay and you’re with it in this corner okay oh welcome back everyone to our first innovation pitch of the day and we have two guests here with me i’ve got danny from inrae and i’ve got his colleague as well who’s talking to us from um claremont philippe
And basically this is about the first version of arpa’s test protocols arpa is for agricultural robot performance assessment we don’t have that much time it’s about safety so i’m just going to throw it straight to you go ahead thank you philip you can start can you hear us it’s okay for me okay
Okay so it’s a pleasure for us to share with with you this information today so we will talk about the new international test service software about asset safety performance of both complete or partial agricultural robotic robotic solutions Just some element concerning aggro technology so it’s phillips yes we don’t see the slides okay um while he’s doing that danny talk us through a little bit about what he’s doing on this uh uh me um oh sorry i’m with uh sharper engineering uh my colleague is with uh inaudible engineering is a
Innovative company we work on uh advanced driving assistance systems dedicated to robots and autonomous vehicles we we have a headquarter in paris okay um i think we’re good okay go ahead go ahead go ahead philip i can i can share my screen it’s impossible okay it’s okay oh it’s okay so
Slide number two please okay so before to details just some elements concerning aggro technopolar it’s an open platform for the development of new technological solutions for agroecological transition we have four axes the first agriculture of off-road agriculture and off-road robotics second technology and service for fertilizing and seeding machine
Third iot information technology for system monitoring and control and the last technology and service for the control of environmental impacts which we work on soil machine interaction energy consumption and electrification and alternative weeding techniques so next slide please so uh the main motivation for this test service offer comes from result of a
French study 2080 sol rob a funded by france agreement and operated by the work group swissay of robergli so the main the main objective of this study was to identify agricultural robotics needs and issue and the conclusion of the study how that robot safety is major issue for production and marketing
And manufacturers needs structure for safety assessments next slide please uh on in the axis of agricultural and raw off-road fraud robotics nri and sharp engineering joined forces through the agrotechnopol to bring this first offer on performance performances assessment of a safety function this offer is based on the work that we
Had lead between the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2021 it concerns agricultural robot performances assessment which is also the name of the project aarpa for agricultural robot performance assessments and this project has been funded by aggro food and we propose to share with you results which are the design of three
Test protocol next slide please so the three test protocols are about first the safety function to detect an avoid collision with a reference uptaker of the 18497 standard named airport one second the assessment of perception system performances and their actual environmental condition like rain fog for lighting name arpa2 and finally the
Safety function to satisfy your work area integrity so with these four three protocols the ambition was to produce finalized documents for protocols reports and to develop tools and methods for testing i will talk about the upper one uh uh i remind that that the the purpose of
The upper one is to detect and avoid the collision with reference obstacles the test for so-called is based on the iso 18 4 9 7 standards now we have we have an extract of key points of these standards uh on this slide we have the the reference
Obstacles and uh a description of it which is in agreement with the standards first we have to uh the machine has to to learn a trajectory uh secondly uh we have to to place uh the obstacle one different position of the trajectory of the mission in order to enter
To to cover the entire hard hardest zone the the trajectory the obstacle position free is fixed regarding to the lateral deviation tests are repeated seven times during this in these protocols As we can we can see on the upper right we have an absolute lazar tracker for monitoring the robot during the placement an an optical site is fixed on the machine for tracking purpose finally for Checking purpose metrics uh are used uh for monitoring the robot the robot speed and also the lateral deviation uh we have made several tests with different machines on this video you can see the ctr the vitibot machines moving forward And facing the obstacles on the upper left we can see in blue the kinetic the evolution of the kinetic energy of the machine during the test and uh and on the upper right the Evolution of the lateral distance between the robot and the obstacle also we have made a test with the ctr machine as you can see if the employment when we are is bigger we can the the machine software has to take into account and consider a a bigger bound boxes so the robot can
Pass the obstacle safely so now alpha 2 so the aim of the protocol is to assess the robustness of the perception system when it works in harsh condition so our part 2 is a test protocol based on the iso 18497 standard of 28 and here you have an extract of the key
Point for from the standard so next slide please with our partner ceremony we have designed a test protocol using the platform of cerama which is a chamber in which we we can control the density of fog and rain the objective is to introduce a perceptron system in this chamber and to
Observe to observe their signal and their capacity to detect obstacles so in our experiment we use five density levels of rain the fog and for the fog the fog is brought to saturation then measurements are taken throughout the its dispersion next slide please so the aim of alpha 2 is to evaluate the
Safety function of the robot so in this protocol we decide to evaluate the detection of obstacles for two position emergency stop boundary and detection boundary next slide please so in this slide uh this slide shows the condition of our test with the robot on the right just the slide before please it
Doesn’t work can i try no i think you’re just gonna have to talk through it yes go ahead talk through the slide we can’t see it but talk about it yes you may please uh it doesn’t park some real-time problems yeah we can’t see the slide but
Can you talk about what we’re supposed to be seeing phillip or you can can you it’s there’s just just some it’s not the good slide but uh it’s not a problem okay uh concerning this slide uh in fact it’s for the the protocol number three which is uh uh This is a focus on uh uh just remind that the question is to work on the area integrity your fencing yeah so test protocol is based on iso 18497 standard of 28 and here you have a description of the test area in fact so Yes well i can add so the the work area is adaptable regarding the robot dimension we we have Many uh barriers in order to to make it difficult for the for the robot some straight-line trajectory of cycle edges and also acute and object angles we’re now going through all the slides very very quickly i can see we don’t have much time left maybe you need to do
A little summing up here yeah i i i will go on one conclusion some videos uh now we we have uh a video uh on the our part three uh when they are part three uh the robot uh uh follows the the trajectory
I i has to i have to to remind that the the purpose is to monitor the they work their career integrity uh commonly named the gerald fencing uh now we have uh two two robots the agreement culture robot and the ctr robot They follow the trajectory in order to cover the entire zone of the work area we we want to take uh the advantage of this opportunity to to to thank the industrial partners of the of the project uh ctr agriculture and vitabot their contribution echoed the credibility of these affair tests also the
Offer test of we present here has a Strong points first we target uh off-road machines and robot manufacturer market also an oem 2 Our offer test is not only based on protocols designed regarding standards and fmeca but also discouraged and evaluated by industrial partners uh it’s also very interesting for a manufacturer to argue that there are test results or obtained by a third party we use uh high precision sensors for tracking and monitoring the displacement
Of the robot we also able to do a custom customer test based the one specific needs of manufacturers in terms of perspectives we plan to extend upper one uh by working on alternative obstacle like human shape and mobile obstacle because the obstacle defense obstacle we used represent a human seated
Also by developing a test protocol for dust condition for upper two and improve tools for data analysis in case of upper three and also for next feature safety test in relation with other aspects for ai using in order for to to have our power for to operate thank you
Thank you very much to both of you it’s not easy having a you’re having it partly online you hear my heart feels for you i know it’s not easy but you’re going to be sticking around so if you do have questions you’re ready in the audience to take
Questions right yeah yeah so um we’re going to conclude on this one thank you very much for joining for a year and um thank you very much questions do send your questions in online and of course you’re available right after this we’re going to have a new innovo pitch
Coming up in just five minutes time on the opportunities and challenges for highly automated machines to see you in a few minutes i’m available for any questions you