Gradient-based Local Next-best-view Planning for Improved Perception of Targeted Plant Nodes

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Burusa, Akshay K., van Henten, Eldert J., Kootstra, Gert
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909184081002496
author Burusa, Akshay K.
van Henten, Eldert J.
Kootstra, Gert
author_facet Burusa, Akshay K.
van Henten, Eldert J.
Kootstra, Gert
contents Robots are increasingly used in tomato greenhouses to automate labour-intensive tasks such as selective harvesting and de-leafing. To perform these tasks, robots must be able to accurately and efficiently perceive the plant nodes that need to be cut, despite the high levels of occlusion from other plant parts. We formulate this problem as a local next-best-view (NBV) planning task where the robot has to plan an efficient set of camera viewpoints to overcome occlusion and improve the quality of perception. Our formulation focuses on quickly improving the perception accuracy of a single target node to maximise its chances of being cut. Previous methods of NBV planning mostly focused on global view planning and used random sampling of candidate viewpoints for exploration, which could suffer from high computational costs, ineffective view selection due to poor candidates, or non-smooth trajectories due to inefficient sampling. We propose a gradient-based NBV planner using differential ray sampling, which directly estimates the local gradient direction for viewpoint planning to overcome occlusion and improve perception. Through simulation experiments, we showed that our planner can handle occlusions and improve the 3D reconstruction and position estimation of nodes equally well as a sampling-based NBV planner, while taking ten times less computation and generating 28% more efficient trajectories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_16759
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gradient-based Local Next-best-view Planning for Improved Perception of Targeted Plant Nodes
Burusa, Akshay K.
van Henten, Eldert J.
Kootstra, Gert
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robots are increasingly used in tomato greenhouses to automate labour-intensive tasks such as selective harvesting and de-leafing. To perform these tasks, robots must be able to accurately and efficiently perceive the plant nodes that need to be cut, despite the high levels of occlusion from other plant parts. We formulate this problem as a local next-best-view (NBV) planning task where the robot has to plan an efficient set of camera viewpoints to overcome occlusion and improve the quality of perception. Our formulation focuses on quickly improving the perception accuracy of a single target node to maximise its chances of being cut. Previous methods of NBV planning mostly focused on global view planning and used random sampling of candidate viewpoints for exploration, which could suffer from high computational costs, ineffective view selection due to poor candidates, or non-smooth trajectories due to inefficient sampling. We propose a gradient-based NBV planner using differential ray sampling, which directly estimates the local gradient direction for viewpoint planning to overcome occlusion and improve perception. Through simulation experiments, we showed that our planner can handle occlusions and improve the 3D reconstruction and position estimation of nodes equally well as a sampling-based NBV planner, while taking ten times less computation and generating 28% more efficient trajectories.
title Gradient-based Local Next-best-view Planning for Improved Perception of Targeted Plant Nodes
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.16759