Search arXiv⌕ Search

arXiv · 2610.08603

A Swarm-Coordinated Multi-Robot System for Early Stress Detection in Agricultural Rows Using Multimodal Leaf Sensing

Abstract

Early stress detection in crops is a necessity today to improve efficiency and reduce waste of time, money, and effort. However, most modern techniques, such as hyperspectral imaging and AI-based systems, are too costly and complex for medium and small-scale farmers to implement. This paper showcases CropSentry, a low-cost, ground-based multi-robot system that uses multimodal leaf sensing to continuously monitor crop health by tracking stress levels. The system comprises two autonomous bots that continuously detect leaf color and environmental data row by row. The observations are spatially mapped and sent over to the master bot, which uses color-coded row segments to generate a real-time web-based dashboard displaying crop health. After 63 observations were collected during the experiments, the results showed an overall crop health classification accuracy of 84.12%, with 82.60% for healthy plants, 88% for nutrient-deficient plants, and 80% for diseased plants. Also, 100% wireless communication success rate across 10 slave observations was achieved. Close-range leaf inspection across multiple bots can detect early stress in crops while remaining affordable, accessible, and scalable. It provides farmers with timely information to improve resource utilization and crop management.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Rishi Gupta, Astha Goyal, Vinay Vishwakarma. 2026-10-06. A Swarm-Coordinated Multi-Robot System for Early Stress Detection in Agricultural Rows Using Multimodal Leaf Sensing. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08603

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

The Kinetics Observer: A Tightly Coupled Estimator for Legged Robots

This paper presents the Kinetics Observer, a novel proprioceptive state estimator for legged robots designed to provide the feedback required for versatile locomotion and physical interaction with the environment, with enhanced robustness to contact slippage. Its core contribution is a tight coupling between whole-body kinematics and external wrenches through a contact dynamics model, enabling the consistent fusion of leg kinematics, IMU, and wrench sensor measurements for real-time joint estimation of centroidal kinematics, contact rest poses, contact wrenches, and disturbance wrenches. By exploiting contact wrench measurements as correction terms, the proposed observer increases sensing redundancy, which provides observability of contact slippage relative to the centroid frame and enhanced robustness to modeling and sensor errors. The approach is experimentally evaluated on two humanoid robots across three scenarios totaling thirteen walking sequences, including long-distance walking with repeated contact changes, locomotion over slippery obstacles, and non-coplanar multicontact motion.

cs.RO↗

RoboAug: One Annotation to Hundreds of Scenes via Region-Contrastive Data Augmentation for Robotic Manipulation

Enhancing the generalization of robotic learning in diverse unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often rely on large-scale pretraining, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, or semantic data augmentation methods that assume flawless upstream object detection in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose RoboAug, a novel generative data augmentation framework that reduces reliance on large-scale pretraining and perfect visual recognition by requiring only a single image with bounding box annotations for dataset construction. Leveraging this minimal supervision, RoboAug employs pretrained generative models for precise semantic augmentation and introduces a plug-and-play region-contrastive loss to guide attention toward task-relevant regions, thereby enhancing generalization and task success rates. Extensive real-world experiments on UR-5e, AgileX, and Tian Gong 2.0 demonstrate that RoboAug consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under background, distractor, and lighting shifts. Our project is available at https://x-roboaug.github.io/.

cs.RO↗

ActionCodec: What Makes for Good Action Tokenizers

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leveraging the native autoregressive paradigm of Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated superior instruction-following and training efficiency. Central to this paradigm is action tokenization, yet its design has primarily focused on reconstruction fidelity, failing to address its direct impact on VLA optimization. Consequently, the fundamental question of \textit{what makes for good action tokenizers} remains unanswered. In this paper, we bridge this gap by establishing design principles specifically from the perspective of VLA optimization. We identify a set of best practices based on information-theoretic insights, including maximized temporal token overlap, minimized vocabulary redundancy, enhanced multimodal mutual information, and token independence. Guided by these principles, we introduce \textbf{ActionCodec}, a high-performance action tokenizer that significantly enhances both training efficiency and VLA performance across diverse simulation and real-world benchmarks. Notably, on LIBERO, a SmolVLM2-2.2B fine-tuned with ActionCodec achieves a 95.5\% success rate without any robotics pre-training. With advanced architectural enhancements, this reaches 97.4\%, representing a new SOTA for VLA models without robotics pre-training. We believe our established design principles, alongside the released model, will provide a clear roadmap for the community to develop more effective action tokenizers.

cs.RO↗