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

先进智能系统（AIS）是一家位于加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省本拿比的加拿大公司，是一家新兴但正在成长的公司，致力于在农业和农业领域应用无人系统的世界级研发。AIS的研发活动是针对在苗圃和温室中使用无人系统，使用AIS设计和制造的移动机械手来移动盆栽，以扩展AIS专有平台的用例。本研究项目的重点是设计和开发算法程序，使现有的AIS移动机械手BigTop（即顶部装有铰接式机械臂的轮式移动基座）能够利用车载传感器（即摄像头、imu、激光雷达和轮式编码器）完全自主地识别、跟踪、分类种植花盆，并将其运送到所需位置，而无需任何人工干预。申请人及其研究团队将提供以下所需的专业知识：i)计算机视觉方法，以识别和估计种植花盆的姿势，以便正确抓取，以及ii)移动平台自主操作的同步定位和绘图（SLAM）方法。

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.