Design and validation of testing facilities for weeding robots as part of ROSE Challenge

Guillaume Avrin (1) , Daniel Boffety (2) , Sophie Lardy-Fontan (1) , Rémi Regnier (1) , Rémi Rescoussié (3) , Virginie Barbosa (1)

1 LNE - Laboratoire National de Métrologie et d'Essais [Trappes]
2 INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement
3 IRSTEA - Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies pour l'environnement et l'agriculture

The ROSE Challenge is the first robotics and artificial intelligence competition worldwide to implement a third-party performance evaluation of intra-row weeding robots in real conditions, under comparable conditions, to guarantee a credible and objective assessment of their effectiveness. This article reports on the design and validation of testing facilities for this competition, which presents a particular complexity : the experiments take place outdoors and act on living things (crops and weeds). Moreover, it implies to guarantee repeatable experimental conditions for a comparable and equitable evaluation. The article also discusses the opportunity that these competitions represent to define testing facilities in a consensual way. The method it proposes is very widely applicable to different fields of intelligent systems applications.

Domaines: Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]; Automatique / Robotique; Performance et fiabilité [cs.PF]

Guillaume Avrin, Daniel Boffety, Sophie Lardy-Fontan, Rémi Regnier, Rémi Rescoussié, et al.. Design and validation of testing facilities for weeding robots as part of ROSE Challenge. Evaluating Progress in IA (EPAI), Sep 2020, Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle (virtual conference), Spain. ⟨hal-03010299⟩