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Article

End–Edge–Cloud Collaborative Fast–Slow Semantic Planning for Agricultural Field Robots

School of Mechanical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
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Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Agronomy 2026, 16(17), 1725; https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16171725
Submission received: 22 July 2026 / Revised: 23 August 2026 / Accepted: 2 September 2026 / Published: 4 September 2026
(This article belongs to the Collection Advances of Agricultural Robotics in Sustainable Agriculture 4.0)

Abstract

Agricultural multi-robot systems in narrow and dynamic environments require global coordination, semantic event interpretation, and responsive trajectory execution. This study presents an end–edge–cloud fast–slow semantic planning framework. The cloud maintains a farm topology and generates fleet-level dispatch policies; the edge hosts an asynchronous agentic vision–language planner and a fast trajectory planner; and the robot performs sensing, LiDAR odometry, low-level control, and execution. The fast planner reuses the latest valid semantic condition until an event-triggered update becomes available. The fast branch is pretrained on nuScenes and adapted using the training and validation subsets of a 3780-sample agricultural dataset comprising synchronized front- and rear-view images, robot states, motion histories, and future trajectories, with an independent 630-sample test set reserved for final evaluation. On an edge-side RTX 4080 SUPER, the complete planner achieves an average L2 error of 0.67 m, a fast-step latency of 96.3 ms, and a throughput of 10.4 Hz. In the four-robot topology experiment, the framework achieves a 100.0% success rate under the representative single-blockage condition and maintains an 86.7% success rate under the dual-blockage condition. During an approximately 30 min operation at a nominal semantic update rate of 2 Hz, the cloud and robot communication round-trip times average 24.43 and 3.85 ms, respectively, with no robot deadline misses, while the mean trigger-to-updated-trajectory latency of the full event-driven pipeline is 2357.37 ms. These results demonstrate the feasibility of assigning global coordination to the cloud, semantic reasoning and trajectory inference to the edge, and sensing and execution to the robot.
Keywords: agricultural robots; end–edge–cloud collaboration; multi-robot navigation; fast–slow planning; semantic scheduling; diffusion trajectory generation; smart farming agricultural robots; end–edge–cloud collaboration; multi-robot navigation; fast–slow planning; semantic scheduling; diffusion trajectory generation; smart farming

Share and Cite

MDPI and ACS Style

Gao, B.; Gong, L.; Sun, Y.; Lin, G.; Chen, J.; Xu, Y.; Li, Y.; Liu, C. End–Edge–Cloud Collaborative Fast–Slow Semantic Planning for Agricultural Field Robots. Agronomy 2026, 16, 1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16171725

AMA Style

Gao B, Gong L, Sun Y, Lin G, Chen J, Xu Y, Li Y, Liu C. End–Edge–Cloud Collaborative Fast–Slow Semantic Planning for Agricultural Field Robots. Agronomy. 2026; 16(17):1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16171725

Chicago/Turabian Style

Gao, Bishu, Liang Gong, Yefeng Sun, Gengjie Lin, Jiayu Chen, Yifan Xu, Yanming Li, and Chengliang Liu. 2026. "End–Edge–Cloud Collaborative Fast–Slow Semantic Planning for Agricultural Field Robots" Agronomy 16, no. 17: 1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16171725

APA Style

Gao, B., Gong, L., Sun, Y., Lin, G., Chen, J., Xu, Y., Li, Y., & Liu, C. (2026). End–Edge–Cloud Collaborative Fast–Slow Semantic Planning for Agricultural Field Robots. Agronomy, 16(17), 1725. https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy16171725

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