Introduction

motivation

reduce the cost of food production in the organic agriculture using robots instead of pesticides and expensive, tedious manual labour

The SpECULARIA project proposes a heterogeneous team of robots for small indoor organic farms. One of its crucial components is a robotic manipulator capable of treating plants. The manipulator is designed following the soft robotics paradigm, able to autonomously conduct plant treatment procedures like pinching, topping or removing excess flowers.

UAV plays a surveillance role, detecting and deciding which plants need treatment. The plants are grown in container unit. The UGV transports the plants to the workstation, where a robot manipulator treats the plants under controlled conditions. As a labour intensive activity performed several times in the season, harvesting is a perfect candidate for automation.

contributions

sweet pepper 6DOF pose

  • RGB-D

  • deep learning

  • geometric model fitting

harvesting state machine

  • manipulator control in structured greenhouse harvesting mission

  • trajectory VS servo

experimental validation

  • perception method

    • sim2real

    • transfer learning

  • closed loop manipulator motion control

  • grasping using Franka Emika

  • Intel RealSense D435 camera