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Reproducible Pruning System on Dynamic Natural Plants for Field Agricultural Robots

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Human-Friendly Robotics 2020 (HFR 2020)

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 18))

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Abstract

Pruning is the art of cutting unwanted and unhealthy plant branches and is one of the difficult tasks in the field robotics. It becomes even more complex when the plant branches are moving. Moreover, the reproducibility of robot pruning skills is another challenge to deal with due to the heterogeneous nature of vines in the vineyard. This research proposes a multi-modal framework to deal with the dynamic vines with the aim of sim2real skill transfer. The 3D models of vines are constructed in blender engine and rendered in simulated environment as a need for training the network. The Natural Admittance Controller (NAC) is applied to deal with the dynamics of vines. It uses force feedback and compensates the friction effects while maintaining the passivity of system. The faster R-CNN trained on 3D vine models, is used to detect the spurs and then the statistical pattern recognition algorithm using K-means clustering is applied to find the effective pruning points. The proposed framework is tested in simulated and real environments .

This research is supported in part by the project “Grape Vine Perception and Winter Pruning Automation” funded by joint lab of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, and the project “Improving Reproducibility in Learning Physical Manipulation Skills with Simulators Using Realistic Variations” funded by EU H2020 ERA-Net Chist-Era program.

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Correspondence to Sunny Katyara .

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Katyara, S., Ficuciello, F., Caldwell, D.G., Chen, F., Siciliano, B. (2021). Reproducible Pruning System on Dynamic Natural Plants for Field Agricultural Robots. In: Saveriano, M., Renaudo, E., Rodríguez-Sánchez, A., Piater, J. (eds) Human-Friendly Robotics 2020. HFR 2020. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71356-0_1

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