Detection and classification of plant pots in real time using artificial intelligence methods for mobile manipulators used in nursery farms and greenhouses

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Advanced Intelligent Systems (AIS), a Canadian company located in Burnaby, BC, Canada is a new, but growing, company conducting world-class R&D on Unmanned Systems with applications in farming and agriculture. At AIS the R&D activities are directed towards the use of unmanned systems in nursery farms and greenhouses for moving planted pots using a mobile manipulator designed and manufactured AIS to expand the use cases of the AIS proprietary platform. This research project focuses on the design and development of algorithmic procedures to enable the existing mobile manipulator of AIS called BigTop (i.e., a wheeled mobile base equipped with an articulated robotic arm on top) to identify, track, classify planted pots, pick up and deliver them to their desired locations using onboard sensors, namely cameras, IMUs, LiDAR, and wheel encoders, fully autonomously and without any human intervention. The applicant and his research team will provide the expertise required for i) computer vision methods to recognize and estimate the pose of planted pots for proper grasping, and ii) the simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) methods for autonomous operation of the mobile platform.