Agricultural robots are expected to increase yields in a sustainable way and automate precision tasks, such as weeding and plant monitoring. At the same time, they move in a continuously changing, semi-structured field environment, in which features can hardly be found and reproduced at a later time. Challenges for Lidar and visual detection systems stem from the fact that plants can be very small, overlapping and have a steadily changing appearance. Therefore, a popular way to localize vehicles with high accuracy is based on ex- pensive global navigation satellite systems and not on natural landmarks. The contribution of this work is a novel image- based plant localization technique that uses the time-invariant stem emerging point as a reference. Our approach is based on a fully convolutional neural network that learns landmark localization from RGB and NIR image input in an end-to-end manner. The network performs pose regression to generate a plant location likelihood map. Our approach allows us to cope with visual variances of plants both for different species and different growth stages. We achieve high localization accuracies as shown in detailed evaluations of a sugar beet cultivation phase. In experiments with our BoniRob we demonstrate that detections can be robustly reproduced with centimeter accuracy.
Plant localization is useful for agricultural robots in a number of ways. In orchards, the semi-structured environment has been used for mapping and localization purposes: @cite_4 find olive tree stems by camera and laser scanner detection, which then work as landmarks in a SLAM system.
@cite_4
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Agricultural robots are expected to increase yields in a sustainable way and automate precision tasks, such as weeding and plant monitoring. At the same time, they move in a continuously changing, semi-structured field environment, in which features can hardly be found and reproduced at a later time. Challenges for Lidar and visual detection systems stem from the fact that plants can be very small, overlapping and have a steadily changing appearance. Therefore, a popular way to localize vehicles with high accuracy is based on ex- pensive global navigation satellite systems and not on natural landmarks. The contribution of this work is a novel image- based plant localization technique that uses the time-invariant stem emerging point as a reference. Our approach is based on a fully convolutional neural network that learns landmark localization from RGB and NIR image input in an end-to-end manner. The network performs pose regression to generate a plant location likelihood map. Our approach allows us to cope with visual variances of plants both for different species and different growth stages. We achieve high localization accuracies as shown in detailed evaluations of a sugar beet cultivation phase. In experiments with our BoniRob we demonstrate that detections can be robustly reproduced with centimeter accuracy. Precision agricultural maps are required for agricultural machinery navigation, path planning and plantation supervision. In this work we present a Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm solved by an Extended Information Filter (EIF) for agricultural environments (olive groves). The SLAM algorithm is implemented on an unmanned non-holonomic car-like mobile robot. The map of the environment is based on the detection of olive stems from the plantation. The olive stems are acquired by means of both: a range sensor laser and a monocular vision system. A support vector machine (SVM) is implemented on the vision system to detect olive stems on the images acquired from the environment. Also, the SLAM algorithm has an optimization criterion associated with it. This optimization criterion is based on the correction of the SLAM system state vector using only the most meaningful stems - from an estimation convergence perspective - extracted from the environment information without compromising the estimation consistency. The optimization criterion, its demonstration and experimental results within real agricultural environments showing the performance of our proposal are also included in this work. Precision farming robots, which target to reduce the amount of herbicides that need to be brought out in the fields, must have the ability to identify crops and weeds in real time to trigger weeding actions. In this paper, we address the problem of CNN-based semantic segmentation of crop fields separating sugar beet plants, weeds, and background solely based on RGB data. We propose a CNN that exploits existing vegetation indexes and provides a classification in real time. Furthermore, it can be effectively re-trained to so far unseen fields with a comparably small amount of training data. We implemented and thoroughly evaluated our system on a real agricultural robot operating in different fields in Germany and Switzerland. The results show that our system generalizes well, can operate at around 20 Hz, and is suitable for online operation in the fields. In this paper we present a perception system for agriculture robotics that enables an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) equipped with a multi spectral camera to automatically perform the crop weed detection and classification tasks in real-time. Our approach exploits a pipeline that includes two different convolutional neural networks (CNNs) applied to the input RGB+near infra-red (NIR) images. A lightweight CNN is used to perform a fast and robust, pixel-wise, binary image segmentation, in order to extract the pixels that represent projections of 3D points that belong to green vegetation. A deeper CNN is then used to classify the extracted pixels between the crop and weed classes. A further important contribution of this work is a novel unsupervised dataset summarization algorithm that automatically selects from a large dataset the most informative subsets that better describe the original one. This enables to streamline and speed-up the manual dataset labeling process, otherwise extremely time consuming, while preserving good classification performance. Experiments performed on different datasets taken from a real farm robot confirm the effectiveness of our approach.