BonnBot-I: A Precise Weed Management and Crop Monitoring Platform

TL;DR

BonnBot-I is a precise, integrated weed management and crop monitoring platform that enhances plant localization accuracy and reduces movement in weed control, advancing sustainable agriculture practices.

Contribution

The paper introduces BonnBot-I, a novel platform combining crop monitoring with improved localization and a new weed control mechanism, reducing movement and herbicide use.

Findings

Crop localization error reduced from 8.3% to 3.5%.

Workspace division reduces movement by 50%.

Effective weed control with minimal herbicide application.

Abstract

Cultivation and weeding are two of the primary tasks performed by farmers today. A recent challenge for weeding is the desire to reduce herbicide and pesticide treatments while maintaining crop quality and quantity. In this paper, we introduce BonnBot-I a precise weed management platform which can also performs field monitoring. Driven by crop monitoring approaches that can accurately locate and classify plants (weed and crop) we further improve their performance by fusing the platform available GNSS and wheel odometry. This improves the tracking accuracy of our crop monitoring approach from a normalized average error of 8.3% to 3.5%, evaluated on a new publicly available corn dataset. We also present a novel arrangement of weeding tools mounted on linear actuators evaluated in simulated environments. We replicate weed distributions from a real field, using the results from our monitoring approach, and show the validity of our work-space division techniques which require significantly less movement (a 50% reduction) to achieve similar results. Overall, BonnBot-I is a significant step forward in precise weed management with a novel method of selectively spraying and controlling weeds in an arable field.