Title
A Robot System for Pruning Grape Vines.
Abstract
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. (C) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1002/rob.21680
JOURNAL OF FIELD ROBOTICS
Field
DocType
Volume
Vineyard,Computer vision,Robotic systems,Robotic arm,Simulation,Bundle adjustment,Vine,Artificial intelligence,Engineering,Robot,Trajectory,Pruning
Journal
34.0
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
SP6.0
1556-4959
9
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.61
31
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tom Botterill1837.82
Scott Paulin2111.36
Richard D. Green37017.50
Samuel Williams4128298.56
Jessica Lin516232.52
Valerie Saxton6151.19
Steven Mills74117.74
Xiaoqi Chen84414.91
Sam Corbett-Davies91056.23