Design of Stickbug: a Six-Armed Precision Pollination Robot

TL;DR

Stickbug is a novel six-armed pollination robot that combines precision and swarm-like scalability for greenhouse pollination, demonstrating promising initial success and providing open datasets and design resources.

Contribution

This paper introduces Stickbug, a scalable multi-agent pollination robot with innovative navigation, detection, and contact mechanisms, advancing automated greenhouse pollination technology.

Findings

Over 1.5 pollinations per minute achieved

50% success rate in initial tests

Publicly available dataset and design files

Abstract

This work presents the design of Stickbug, a six-armed, multi-agent, precision pollination robot that combines the accuracy of single-agent systems with swarm parallelization in greenhouses. Precision pollination robots have often been proposed to offset the effects of a decreasing population of natural pollinators, but they frequently lack the required parallelization and scalability. Stickbug achieves this by allowing each arm and drive base to act as an individual agent, significantly reducing planning complexity. Stickbug uses a compact holonomic Kiwi drive to navigate narrow greenhouse rows, a tall mast to support multiple manipulators and reach plant heights, a detection model and classifier to identify Bramble flowers, and a felt-tipped end-effector for contact-based pollination. Initial experimental validation demonstrates that Stickbug can attempt over 1.5 pollinations per minute with a 50% success rate. Additionally, a Bramble flower perception dataset was created and is publicly available alongside Stickbug's software and design files.