CottonSim: Development of an autonomous visual-guided robotic cotton-picking system in the Gazebo

In this study, an autonomous visual-guided robotic cotton-picking system, built on a Clearpath's Husky robot platform and the Cotton-Eye perception system, was developed in the Gazebo robotic simulator. Furthermore, a virtual cotton farm was designed and developed as a Robot Operating System (ROS 1) package to deploy the robotic cotton picker in the Gazebo environment for simulating autonomous field navigation. The navigation was assisted by the map coordinates and an RGB-depth camera, while the ROS navigation algorithm utilized a trained YOLOv8n-seg model for instance segmentation. The model achieved a desired mean Average Precision (mAP) of 85.2%, a recall of 88.9%, and a precision of 93.0% for scene segmentation. The developed ROS navigation packages enabled our robotic cotton-picking system to autonomously navigate through the cotton field using map-based and GPS-based approaches, visually aided by a deep learning-based perception system. The GPS-based navigation approach achieved a 100% completion rate (CR) with a threshold of 5 x 10^-6 degrees, while the map-based navigation approach attained a 96.7% CR with a threshold of 0.25 m. This study establishes a fundamental baseline of simulation for future agricultural robotics and autonomous vehicles in cotton farming and beyond. CottonSim code and data are released to the research community via GitHub: https://github.com/imtheva/CottonSim