Effective Sensing for Robotic Tasks- Still a Challenge

Kit Wong
Callaghan Innovation

Effective and reliable sensing for the performance of robotic tasks, such as manipulation in the outdoor environment remains a challenging problem.

While commercially available solutions such as ASA-LIFT are available for specific tasks and crops, and for operation in specific conditions, the systems are either not cost effective and or physically unsuitable for specific farming conditions and practices.

This research proposed to develop a mobile robot system with flexibility to adapt and with intelligence to cope with natural variability; through a two-fold aim utilising vision for navigation and manipulation. This talk discussed some of the recent developments on these aspects.

In particular, the talk focused on a novel approach that analyses point cloud information from a time-of-flight (ToF) camera to identify the location of foremost spring onions along the crop bed, for the intention of robotic manipulation. The process uses a combination of 2D image processing on the amplitude data, as well as 3D spatial analysis, extracted from the camera to locate the desired object.

Whilst the experimental results demonstrated the robustness of this approach, further testing was required to determine the ability of a system to cope with different scenarios that exist in the naturally varying environment.

For validation, the vision system was integrated with a robotic manipulation system and initial results of the investigation were presented.