Bhaavin Kishore Jogeshwar, Ph.D.University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida
Friday, November 7th, 2025, 3:00 - 4:00 PM
Jett Hall, room 109
Title: Multi-Agent Coverage Planning for Agricultural Soil and Crop Monitoring
ABSTRACT: Efficient coordination of multiple robots is essential for precision agriculture tasks such as planting, watering, and soil monitoring. This talk presents a decentralized, behavior-based planning framework developed for autonomous rovers operating in a constrained, farm-like environment. Each agent performs tasks independently, prioritizing unexplored regions based on local proximity and column availability. The system supports dynamic rerouting without global coordination and promotes collaboration by allowing idle agents to assist peers, thereby reducing idle time and improving coverage efficiency. We implement this framework in a simulated farm environment and compare it against a rigid preassigned-column baseline. Across diverse grid scenarios, our approach achieves complete task coverage with lower average simulation time, robust recovery from agent failures, and consistent performance under varying deployment conditions. The system is scalable, fault-tolerant, and well-suited for autonomous multi-robot operations in dynamic agricultural settings.
BIO: Bhaavin Kishore Jogeshwar is a Ph.D. student in the Intelligent Systems and Robotics program at the University of West Florida. His research interests include machine learning, multi-agent systems, robot path planning, and neuroscience. Bhaavin holds a Master of Science in Robotics Engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Massachusetts, US, and a Bachelor of Technology in Mechatronics Engineering from Manipal Institute of Technology, Karnataka, India. His MS thesis focused on predictive analyses of Alzheimer's Disease using brain MRI scans and machine learning, where he identified the brain regions that drive Alzheimer's across different sexes and age groups. For his undergraduate thesis, he developed a 3D indoor room mapping system using a multi-agent approach and created a distributed behavior system for seamless UAV collaboration in data sharing. Currently, Bhaavin's research is centered on motion planning and distributed behavior models for multi-UGV systems. Outside of academia, he is a Formula 1 enthusiast and enjoys playing Squash, Tennis, and solving cryptic crosswords.
