An autonomous spraying robot architecture for sucker management in large‐scale hazelnut orchards
Author(s)
Date Issued
2023
Type
article
Volume
41
Issue
7
Start Page
2114
End Page
2132
Journal
Abstract
In this work, motivated by the precision agriculture (PA) paradigm, we address the
problem of managing hazelnut suckering plants on a per‐plant basis in a large‐scale
orchard. Suckering plants, or shortly, suckers, are basal shoots that grow at the base
of a tree and compete with the tree itself for nutrients and water. Generally, in largescale
orchards, suckers are treated with the application of herbicide through
spraying tractors that continuously spray the crops while navigating the whole
orchard. This approach however does not consider the individual needs of each plant
and it is definitely not environmentally‐friendly since a lot of unnecessary solution is
being drained in the soil. For this reason, we propose a novel fully autonomous
sucker management architecture that is able to detect the presence of suckers for
each plant, by relying on a You Only Look Once (YOLO)‐based recognition system,
reconstruct them in three‐dimension and estimate the amount of herbicide solution
needed for the specific plant, based on a data‐driven approach. The herbicide
solution is applied using a ground robot equipped with an RGB‐D camera and a
spraying system. This approach allows to significantly reduce pollution and waste.
Experimental results both for individual components and for the entire architecture
in a real‐world (1:1 scale) hazelnut orchard located in Caprarola, Italy, are provided to
corroborate the proposed architecture.