Vision-guided robotic leaf picking

Abstract

The key focus of precision agriculture is the ability to monitor the health of individual plants. While visual monitoring was made easier by incorporating autonomous ground and aerial vehicles, regular sampling of leaves and soil to perform chemical analysis is still necessary. The focus of this work is to propose a leaf sampling system that uses a monocular camera and a 6-DOF robot arm to detect, track, and pick healthy and unhealthy leaves without prior knowledge about the plant. The approach focuses on the challenges of operating in the real world with the aim of increasing the robustness of the system.