Automated Pruning of Polyculture Plants

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel autonomous system combining hardware and algorithms to automate pruning in polyculture farming, aiming to improve plant diversity and canopy coverage over multiple growth cycles.

Contribution

It presents a new integrated hardware and software system for automated pruning in polyculture, including neural networks and custom tools, tested over 60-day cycles.

Findings

Achieved 0.94 normalized plant diversity with pruning shears

Maintained an average canopy coverage of 0.84

Successfully executed autonomous pruning over four 60-day cycles

Abstract

Polyculture farming has environmental advantages but requires substantially more pruning than monoculture farming. We present novel hardware and algorithms for automated pruning. Using an overhead camera to collect data from a physical scale garden testbed, the autonomous system utilizes a learned Plant Phenotyping convolutional neural network and a Bounding Disk Tracking algorithm to evaluate the individual plant distribution and estimate the state of the garden each day. From this garden state, AlphaGardenSim selects plants to autonomously prune. A trained neural network detects and targets specific prune points on the plant. Two custom-designed pruning tools, compatible with a FarmBot gantry system, are experimentally evaluated and execute autonomous cuts through controlled algorithms. We present results for four 60-day garden cycles. Results suggest the system can autonomously achieve 0.94 normalized plant diversity with pruning shears while maintaining an average canopy coverage of 0.84 by the end of the cycles. For code, videos, and datasets, see https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/pruningpolyculture.