A vision-based autonomous inter-row weeder

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Sruthi Moorthy1_{, Renaud Detry}2_{, Bernard Boigelot}2_{, Benoît Mercatoris}1

1_{Gembloux Agro-Bio Tech, University of Liège, Belgium} 2_{Montefiore Institute, University of Liège, Belgium}

A VISION-BASED AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC INTERROW-WEEDER

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Overview

¤  Robotic weed destruction – towards sustainable environment

¤  Objective

¤  Challenges foreseen

¤  Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

n  Necessary sensory information n  Appropriate choice of sensors n  Vision-based crop row detection

¤  Crop row detection – state of the art

¤  Planned contributions

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Robotic weed destruction – towards

sustainable environment

¤ 

Manual weeding

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Robotic weed destruction – towards

sustainable environment

4

¤ 

Chemical weeding

Why not let the robots do the

otherwise boring and

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Overview

5

¤  Objective

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Objective

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Overview

7

¤  Objective

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Challenges foreseen

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Where am I located?

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Overview

9

¤  Objective

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Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Necessary sensory information

¨ 

For autonomous navigation

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Overview

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¤  Objective

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Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Appropriate choice of sensors

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Low-cost!!!

Information rich

How to exploit the information in the images to

detect the crop rows?

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Overview

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¤  Objective

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Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

¨ 

What we see

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What robot sees

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Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

¨ 

Why is it challenging?

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Missing crops Presence of weeds

Shadow occluding the rows

Crops of varying types and growth stages

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Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

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Ideal case

16 Original Image Enhanced contrast between plants and background Pre-processing step Plants separated from the background Crop rows (lines) detected by Hough transform Crop rows (lines) detected by Hough transform

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Overview

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¤  Objective

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Crop row detection – state of the art

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¤ 

Handling all the uncertainties of the ever-evolving real

world – daunting task

¤ 

Existing works do not handle all the variabilities

encountered in agriculture

n technique handling missing crops fails when there is high

weed pressure and vice versa [J. M. Guerrero et. al, 2013]

¤ 

Static predetermined chain of pre-processing

techniques

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Overview

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¤  Objective

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Planned contributions

Short-term

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¤  Enabling accurate and robust crop row detection

n  Selecting various combinations of multiple appropriate

pre-processing techniques

n  Using machine learning to dynamically select the best set of

pre-processing techniques for the given problem at hand

n  Hough transform and RANSAC based algorithms for fitting the lines

after pre-processing

n  Kalman filter like data fusion algorithms to combine data from

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Planned contributions

Long-term

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A vision-based autonomous inter-row weeder

Overview

Robotic weed destruction – towards

sustainable environment

Manual weeding

Robotic weed destruction – towards

sustainable environment

Chemical weeding

Why not let the robots do the

otherwise boring and

Overview

Objective

Overview

Challenges foreseen

Overview

Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Necessary sensory information

For autonomous navigation

Overview

Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Appropriate choice of sensors

How to exploit the information in the images to

detect the crop rows?

Overview

Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

What we see

What robot sees

Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

Why is it challenging?

Sensing – for intelligent and autonomous robots

Vision-based crop row detection

Ideal case

Overview

Crop row detection – state of the art

Handling all the uncertainties of the ever-evolving real

world – daunting task

Existing works do not handle all the variabilities

encountered in agriculture

Static predetermined chain of pre-processing

techniques

Overview

Planned contributions

Short-term

Planned contributions

Long-term

Thank you!!