Middleware Challenges in Robotic Fleets for Precision Agriculture

The past decade has witnessed a huge increase in the number of proposed middleware solutions for robotic fleets operating in unstructured environments. As a result, it has become difficult to decide which middleware is the most appropriate for a specific application or application domain. In this paper we first extract a set of common and specific challenges that middlewares address, and group them according to the source domain they have originated within. These challenges are derived from a specific precision agriculture use-case based on the robotic fleet for weed control elaborated within the European project RHEA-robot fleets for highly effective agriculture and forestry management. Furthermore, the paper provides an analysis of a number of different middlewares and suggests a set of criteria for systemizing representative solutions. The aim of this analysis is to assist the process of finding an adequate middleware for a specific application domain.