Panoptic Mapping with Fruit Completion and Pose Estimation for Horticultural Robots

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel online multi-resolution panoptic mapping system for horticultural robots that accurately completes 3D fruit shapes and estimates their poses, improving agricultural monitoring and robotic applications.

Contribution

It presents a new method combining multi-resolution mapping, learned fruit shape representations, and occlusion-aware rendering for joint shape completion and pose estimation.

Findings

41% improvement in completion accuracy

52% improvement in pose estimation accuracy

0.6s average inference time

Abstract

Monitoring plants and fruits at high resolution play a key role in the future of agriculture. Accurate 3D information can pave the way to a diverse number of robotic applications in agriculture ranging from autonomous harvesting to precise yield estimation. Obtaining such 3D information is non-trivial as agricultural environments are often repetitive and cluttered, and one has to account for the partial observability of fruit and plants. In this paper, we address the problem of jointly estimating complete 3D shapes of fruit and their pose in a 3D multi-resolution map built by a mobile robot. To this end, we propose an online multi-resolution panoptic mapping system where regions of interest are represented with a higher resolution. We exploit data to learn a general fruit shape representation that we use at inference time together with an occlusion-aware differentiable rendering pipeline to complete partial fruit observations and estimate the 7 DoF pose of each fruit in the map. The experiments presented in this paper evaluated both in the controlled environment and in a commercial greenhouse, show that our novel algorithm yields higher completion and pose estimation accuracy than existing methods, with an improvement of 41% in completion accuracy and 52% in pose estimation accuracy while keeping a low inference time of 0.6s in average. Codes are available at: https://github.com/PRBonn/HortiMapping.