SBIR Phase I: Trajectory Optimizations and Learned Foliage Manipulation to Accelerate Throughput in Automated Strawberry Harvesting

这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目的更广泛/商业影响是使草莓的自动化收获更加高效和有效，因此，种植者采用自动化收获在经济上更加可行。目前部署在传统草莓农场中的自动化收割机无法可靠地处理草莓隐藏在厚厚的植物树冠下的旺季条件，并且植物必须移位才能查看和采摘果实。该项目将开发软件，以扩大自动化提高生产力的条件。草莓是美国第二大受欢迎的水果，由于其高触摸收获过程，每英亩收获成本最高。自动化收获过程减少了劳动力需求，有可能降低成本和/或提高水果的质量。此外，该项目预计将为美国工人创造高技能就业机会。该项目的主要技术目标是提高草莓和植物地图的质量和覆盖范围，这将增加收获的草莓数量和采摘率。第一阶段活动的范围是实现两种软件功能，并在模拟、实验室和现场环境中对其进行测试。第一个功能是安装到机器人操纵器的摄像机的轨迹优化模块。这项技术将被设计为最大限度地提高信息增益，并减少定位草莓的不确定性，同时尊重运动学和碰撞约束的机器人手臂的运动。成功是衡量的信息增益相对于一个天真的预先计算的扫描率。第二个是经过训练的神经网络，它估计最好地定义用于置换树叶的操作任务计划的参数，以最大限度地提高草莓的可见性和随后采摘的访问。训练和推理将以端到端的方式进行，允许从场景的彩色和深度相机观察中估计给定任务计划的价值。这与传统管道形成鲜明对比，传统管道无法充分利用神经网络的丰富潜在表示。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader/commercial impact of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to make automated harvesting of strawberries more efficient and effective and hence, more financially viable for growers to adopt. Automated harvesters currently deployed in conventional strawberry farms cannot reliably handle peak-season conditions when strawberries are hidden below a thick plant canopy and where plants must be displaced to view and pick the fruit. This project will develop software to expand the set of conditions whereby automation can increase productivity. Strawberries, the second most popular fruit in the United States, have the highest cost per acre to harvest because of their high touch harvesting process. Automating the harvesting process reduces labor needs, with the potential to either decrease costs and / or increase the quality of the fruit. Further, the project is expected to create high-skill jobs for American workers. This project’s main technical objective is to improve the quality and coverage of the map representation of strawberries and plants which will increase the number of harvested strawberries and the rate at which they are picked. The scope of the Phase I activity is to implement two software capabilities and to test them in simulation, laboratory and field environments. The first capability is a trajectory optimization module for a camera mounted to a robot manipulator. This technology will be designed to maximize information gain and to reduce localization uncertainty for strawberries while respecting kinematic and collision constraints for the motion of the robot arm. Success is to be measured by the rate of information gain relative to a naïve precomputed scan. The second is a trained neural network which estimates the parameters that best define a manipulation task plan for displacing foliage to maximize strawberry visibility and access for subsequent picking. Training and inference will be done in an end-to-end fashion, allowing an estimate of the value of a given task plan from color and depth camera observations of the scene. This contrasts with a conventional pipeline which doesn’t make the most of the rich latent representations possible with neural networks.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.