An Aerial Manipulator for Perception-Driven Flower Targeting Toward Contactless Pollination in Vertical Farming

TL;DR

This paper introduces an aerial robotic system combining perception, control, and manipulation for precise flower targeting in vertical farming, aiming to enable contactless pollination without damaging delicate flowers.

Contribution

It presents a novel integrated aerial manipulator platform with perception, control, and manipulation capabilities tailored for flower targeting in indoor vertical farming environments.

Findings

The system achieves centimeter-level end effector positioning accuracy.

Experimental results show stable UAV flight and reliable flower localization.

Simulation and lab tests validate the platform's effectiveness for contactless pollination tasks.

Abstract

The decline of natural pollinators has created a major challenge for crop production in controlled indoor agriculture, particularly in vertical farming environments where natural insect pollination is absent. This motivates the development of robotic systems capable of performing precise flower targeting tasks while minimizing physical interference with delicate floral structures. This paper presents an aerial manipulator platform for perception driven flower detection, localization, and approach in vertical farming environments. The proposed system integrates onboard RGBD based perception, model predictive path integral (MPPI) based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) control on a PX4 platform, and a lightweight 2DoF manipulator for precise end effector positioning. The platform is evaluated in both MuJoCo simulation and UAV lab experiments using a flower targeting testbed. The experimental results demonstrate stable UAV flight, reliable flower localization, and centimeter level end effector positioning accuracy. In simulation, the proposed controller achieves consistent trajectory convergence and accurate target alignment. In the real world UAV lab environment, the integrated perception control manipulation framework enables stable flower targeted positioning and end effector alignment under constrained aerial operation. These results validate the proposed aerial manipulator as a robust robotic carrier and positioning framework for future contactless pollination systems. While the current study focuses on perception guided targeting and positioning, the developed platform provides a practical foundation for integrating advanced contactless end effectors, including acoustic based pollen manipulation modules, in future work.