PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention

Abstract

We present PATHoBot an autonomous crop surveying and intervention robot for glasshouse environments. The aim of this platform is to autonomously gather high quality data and also estimate key phenotypic parameters. To achieve this we retro-fit an off-the-shelf pipe-rail trolley with an array of multi-modal cameras, navigation sensors and a robotic arm for close surveying tasks and intervention. In this paper we describe PATHoBot design choices made to ensure proper operation in a commercial glasshouse environment. As a surveying platform we collect a number of datasets which include both sweet pepper and tomatoes. We show how PATHoBot enables novel surveillance approaches by first improving our previous work on fruit counting by incorporating wheel odometry and depth information. We find that by introducing re-projection and depth information we are able to achieve an absolute improvement of 20 points over the baseline technique in an "in the wild" situation. Finally, we present a 3D mapping case study, further showcasing PATHoBot's crop surveying capabilities.

Virtual Temporal Samples for Recurrent Neural Networks: applied to semantic segmentation in agriculture

“…To overcome the data requirements of spatio-temporal techniques, we make use of the partially labelled data of [26] and a newly captured dataset of sugar beets. Our proposed temporal data augmentation approach (see Sec.…”

“…Below we briefly describe each dataset. BUP20 was captured under similar conditions to [7] and first presented in [26], however, it was gathered with a robot phenotyping platform. It contains two sweet pepper cultivar, Mavera (yellow) and Allrounder (red), and was recorded in a glasshouse environment.…”