In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance

The rapid evolution of herbicide-resistant weed species has revitalized research in nonchemical methods for weed destruction. Robots with vision-based capabilities for online weed detection and classification are a key enabling factor for the specialized treatment of individual weed species. This paper describes the design, development, and testing of a modular robotic platform with a heterogeneous weeding array for agriculture. Starting from requirements derived from farmer insights, technical specifications are put forward. A design of a robotic platform is conducted based on the required technical specifications, and a prototype is manufactured and tested. The second part of the paper focuses on the weeding mechanism attached to the robotic platform. This includes aspects of vision for weed detection and classification, as well as the design of a weeding array that combines chemical and mechanical methods for weed destruction. Field trials of the weed detection and classification system show an accuracy of 92.3% across a range of weed species, while the heterogeneous weed management system is able to selectively apply a mechanical or chemical control method based on the species of weed. Together, the robotic platform and weeding array demonstrate the potential for robotic plant-species-specific weed management enabled by the vision-based online detection and classification algorithms.

The Amazon Robotics Challenge enlisted sixteen teams to each design a pick-and-place robot for autonomous warehousing, addressing development in robotic vision and manipulation. This paper presents the design of our custombuilt, cost-effective, Cartesian robot system Cartman, which won first place in the competition finals by stowing 14 (out of 16) and picking all 9 items in 27 minutes, scoring a total of 272 points. We highlight our experience-centred design methodology and key aspects of our system that contributed to our competitiveness. We believe these aspects are crucial to building robust and effective robotic systems.

This paper presents a 3D visual detection method for the challenging task of detecting peduncles of sweet peppers (Capsicum annuum) in the field. Cutting the peduncle cleanly is one of the most difficult stages of the harvesting process, where the peduncle is the part of the crop that attaches it to the main stem of the plant. Accurate peduncle detection in 3D space is therefore a vital step in reliable autonomous harvesting of sweet peppers, as this can lead to precise cutting while avoiding damage to the surrounding plant. This paper makes use of both colour and geometry information acquired from an RGB-D sensor and utilises a supervised-learning approach for the peduncle detection task. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated and evaluated using qualitative and quantitative results (the Area-Under-the-Curve (AUC) of the detection precision-recall curve). We are able to achieve an AUC of 0.71 for peduncle detection on field-grown sweet peppers. We release a set of manually annotated 3D sweet pepper and peduncle images to assist the research community in performing further research on this topic.

Robotic challenges like the Amazon Picking Challenge (APC) or the DARPA Challenges are an established and important way to drive scientific progress. They make research comparable on a well-defined benchmark with equal test conditions for all participants. However, such challenge events occur only occasionally, are limited to a small number of contestants, and the test conditions are very difficult to replicate after the main event. We present a new physical benchmark challenge for robotic picking: the ACRV Picking Benchmark. Designed to be reproducible, it consists of a set of 42 common objects, a widely available shelf, and exact guidelines for object arrangement using stencils. A well-defined evaluation protocol enables the comparison of complete robotic systems -including perception and manipulation -instead of sub-systems only. Our paper also describes and reports results achieved by an open baseline system based on a Baxter robot.