VinePT-Map: Pole-Trunk Semantic Mapping for Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Vineyards

TL;DR

VinePT-Map introduces a semantic mapping approach using vine trunks and poles as stable landmarks, enabling resilient, season-agnostic localization for autonomous vineyard robots with low-cost sensors.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel factor graph-based semantic mapping framework leveraging vineyard structures for robust, long-term robot localization across seasons.

Findings

High accuracy in multi-season vineyard localization

Robust landmark detection with low-cost sensors

Effective outlier rejection and pose refinement

Abstract

Reliable long-term deployment of autonomous robots in agricultural environments remains challenging due to perceptual aliasing, seasonal variability, and the dynamic nature of crop canopies. Vineyards, characterized by repetitive row structures and significant visual changes across phenological stages, represent a pivotal field challenge, limiting the robustness of conventional feature-based localization and mapping approaches. This paper introduces VinePT-Map, a semantic mapping framework that leverages vine trunks and support poles as persistent structural landmarks to enable season-agnostic and resilient robot localization. The proposed method formulates the mapping problem as a factor graph, integrating GPS, IMU, and RGB-D observations through robust geometrical constraints that exploit vineyard structure. An efficient perception pipeline based on instance segmentation and tracking, combined with a clustering filter for outlier rejection and pose refinement, enables accurate landmark detection using low-cost sensors and onboard computation. To validate the pipeline, we present a multi-season dataset for trunk and pole segmentation and tracking. Extensive field experiments conducted across diverse seasons demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed approach, highlighting its suitability for long-term autonomous operation in agricultural environments.