Premium
A Robot System for Pruning Grape Vines
Author(s) -
Botterill Tom,
Paulin Scott,
Green Richard,
Williams Samuel,
Lin Jessica,
Saxton Valerie,
Mills Steven,
Chen XiaoQi,
CorbettDavies Sam
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
journal of field robotics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.152
H-Index - 96
eISSN - 1556-4967
pISSN - 1556-4959
DOI - 10.1002/rob.21680
Subject(s) - pruning , vineyard , trajectory , vine , artificial intelligence , computer vision , robotic arm , robot , tree (set theory) , computer science , feature (linguistics) , mathematics , geography , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , physics , botany , archaeology , astronomy , agronomy , biology
This paper describes a robot system for the automatic pruning of grape vines. A mobile platform straddles the row of vines, and it images them with trinocular stereo cameras as it moves. A computer vision system builds a three‐dimensional (3D) model of the vines, an artificial intelligence (AI) system decides which canes to prune, and a six degree‐of‐freedom robot arm makes the required cuts. The system is demonstrated cutting vines in the vineyard. The main contributions of this paper are the computer vision system that builds 3D vine models, and the test of the complete‐integrated system. The vine models capture the structure of the plants so that the AI system can decide where to prune, and they are accurate enough that the robot arm can reach the required cuts. Vine models are reconstructed by matching features between images, triangulating feature matches to give a 3D model, then optimizing the model and the robot's trajectory jointly (incremental bundle adjustment). Trajectories are estimated online at 0.25 m/s, and they have errors below 1% when modeling a 96 m row of 59 vines. Pruning each vine requires the robot arm to cut an average of 8.4 canes. A collision‐free trajectory for the arm is planned in intervals of 1.5 s/vine with a rapidly exploring random tree motion planner. The total time to prune one vine is 2 min in field trials, which is similar to human pruners, and it could be greatly reduced with a faster arm. Trials also show that the long chain of interdependent components limits reliability. A commercially feasible pruning robot should stop and prune each vine in turn.