Summary Technological developments have revolutionized measurements on plant genotypes and phenotypes, leading to routine production of large, complex data sets. This has led to increased efforts to extract meaning from these measurements and to integrate various data sets. Concurrently, machine learning has rapidly evolved and is now widely applied in science in general and in plant genotyping and phenotyping in particular. Here, we review the application of machine learning in the context of plant science and plant breeding. We focus on analyses at different phenotype levels, from biochemical to yield, and in connecting genotypes to these. In this way, we illustrate how machine learning offers a suite of methods that enable researchers to find meaningful patterns in relevant plant data.

We present a database and a software tool, VisGraB, for benchmarking of methods for vision-based grasping of unknown objects with no prior object knowledge. The benchmark is a combined real-world and simulated experimental setup. Stereo images of real scenes containing several objects in di erent configurations are included in the database. The user needs to provide a method for grasp generation based on the real visual input. The grasps are then planned, executed, and evaluated by the provided grasp simulator where several grasp-quality measures are used for evaluation. This setup has the advantage that a large number of grasps can be executed and evaluated while dealing with dynamics and the noise and uncertainty present in the real world images. VisGraB enables a fair comparison among di erent grasping methods. The user furthermore does not need to deal with robot hardware, focusing on the vision methods instead. As a baseline, benchmark results of our grasp strategy are included.

With the exception of a few small‐scale case studies, there has been no real investigation into how European companies manage design, so when Design Management Europe decided to mount a survey of small and medium‐size companies and their design management practices, the results were interesting, and in some cases surprising.

Abstract-Grasping unknown objects based on real-world visual input is a challenging problem. In this paper, we present an Early Cognitive Vision system that builds a hierarchical representation based on edge and texture information, which is a sparse but powerful description of the scene. Based on this representation we generate edge-based and surface-based grasps. The results show that the method generates successful grasps, that the edge and surface information are complimentary, and that the method can deal with more complex scenes. We furthermore present a benchmark for visual-based grasping.

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Robotic plant-specific spraying can reduce herbicide usage in agriculture while minimizing labor costs and maximizing yield. Weed detection is a crucial step in automated weeding. Currently, weed detection algorithms are always evaluated at the image level, using conventional image metrics. However, these metrics do not consider the full pipeline connecting image acquisition to the site-specific operation of the spraying nozzles, which is vital for an accurate evaluation of the system. Therefore, we propose a novel application-specific image-evaluation method, which analyses the weed detections on the plant level and in the light of the spraying decision made by the robot. In this paper, a spraying robot is evaluated on three levels: (1) On image-level, using conventional image metrics, (2) on application-level, using our novel application-specific image-evaluation method, and (3) on field level, in which the weed-detection algorithm is implemented on an autonomous spraying robot and tested in the field. On image level, our detection system achieved a recall of 57% and a precision of 84%, which is a lower performance than detection systems reported in literature. However, integrated on an autonomous volunteer-potato sprayer-system we outperformed the state-of-the-art, effectively controlling 96% of the weeds while terminating only 3% of the crops. Using the application-level evaluation, an accurate indication of the field performance of the weed-detection algorithm prior to the field test was given and the type of errors produced by the spraying system was correctly predicted.

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