PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention

TL;DR

PATHoBot is an autonomous robot designed for efficient crop phenotyping and intervention in glasshouses, utilizing multi-modal sensors and advanced data collection techniques to improve surveillance and mapping accuracy.

Contribution

The paper introduces PATHoBot, a novel autonomous platform that enhances crop phenotyping and surveillance through sensor integration and improved data processing methods.

Findings

20-point improvement in fruit counting accuracy with depth and re-projection.

Successful collection of multi-modal datasets for sweet pepper and tomatoes.

Effective 3D mapping demonstrating crop surveying capabilities.

Abstract

We present PATHoBot an autonomous crop surveying and intervention robot for glasshouse environments. The aim of this platform is to autonomously gather high quality data and also estimate key phenotypic parameters. To achieve this we retro-fit an off-the-shelf pipe-rail trolley with an array of multi-modal cameras, navigation sensors and a robotic arm for close surveying tasks and intervention. In this paper we describe PATHoBot design choices made to ensure proper operation in a commercial glasshouse environment. As a surveying platform we collect a number of datasets which include both sweet pepper and tomatoes. We show how PATHoBot enables novel surveillance approaches by first improving our previous work on fruit counting by incorporating wheel odometry and depth information. We find that by introducing re-projection and depth information we are able to achieve an absolute improvement of 20 points over the baseline technique in an "in the wild" situation. Finally, we present a 3D mapping case study, further showcasing PATHoBot's crop surveying capabilities.