Towards Closing the Loop in Robotic Pollination for Indoor Farming via Autonomous Microscopic Inspection

TL;DR

This paper presents a robotic system for indoor farming that autonomously inspects, pollinates, and verifies flower pollination using a combination of specialized hardware and algorithms, improving efficiency and accuracy in controlled environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel robotic hardware system with integrated inspection and pollination tools, enabling autonomous flower pollination and verification in indoor farming.

Findings

Successful validation of flower detection and pose estimation algorithms

Effective autonomous pollination using the vibrating tool

Microscope inspection confirms pollination success

Abstract

Effective pollination is a key challenge for indoor farming, since bees struggle to navigate without the sun. While a variety of robotic system solutions have been proposed, it remains difficult to autonomously check that a flower has been sufficiently pollinated to produce high-quality fruit, which is especially critical for self-pollinating crops such as strawberries. To this end, this work proposes a novel robotic system for indoor farming. The proposed hardware combines a 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) manipulator arm with a custom end-effector, comprised of an endoscope camera, a 2-DOF microscope subsystem, and a custom vibrating pollination tool; this is paired with algorithms to detect and estimate the pose of strawberry flowers, navigate to each flower, pollinate using the tool, and inspect with the microscope. The key novelty is vibrating the flower from below while simultaneously inspecting with a microscope from above. Each subsystem is validated via extensive experiments.