Enhanced View Planning for Robotic Harvesting: Tackling Occlusions with Imitation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Lun, Kasaei, Hamidreza
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Lun
Kasaei, Hamidreza
author_facet Li, Lun
Kasaei, Hamidreza
contents In agricultural automation, inherent occlusion presents a major challenge for robotic harvesting. We propose a novel imitation learning-based viewpoint planning approach to actively adjust camera viewpoint and capture unobstructed images of the target crop. Traditional viewpoint planners and existing learning-based methods, depend on manually designed evaluation metrics or reward functions, often struggle to generalize to complex, unseen scenarios. Our method employs the Action Chunking with Transformer (ACT) algorithm to learn effective camera motion policies from expert demonstrations. This enables continuous six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) viewpoint adjustments that are smoother, more precise and reveal occluded targets. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments, featuring agricultural scenarios and a 6-DoF robot arm equipped with an RGB-D camera, demonstrate our method's superior success rate and efficiency, especially in complex occlusion conditions, as well as its ability to generalize across different crops without reprogramming. This study advances robotic harvesting by providing a practical "learn from demonstration" (LfD) solution to occlusion challenges, ultimately enhancing autonomous harvesting performance and productivity.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_10334
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhanced View Planning for Robotic Harvesting: Tackling Occlusions with Imitation Learning
Li, Lun
Kasaei, Hamidreza
Robotics
In agricultural automation, inherent occlusion presents a major challenge for robotic harvesting. We propose a novel imitation learning-based viewpoint planning approach to actively adjust camera viewpoint and capture unobstructed images of the target crop. Traditional viewpoint planners and existing learning-based methods, depend on manually designed evaluation metrics or reward functions, often struggle to generalize to complex, unseen scenarios. Our method employs the Action Chunking with Transformer (ACT) algorithm to learn effective camera motion policies from expert demonstrations. This enables continuous six-degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) viewpoint adjustments that are smoother, more precise and reveal occluded targets. Extensive experiments in both simulated and real-world environments, featuring agricultural scenarios and a 6-DoF robot arm equipped with an RGB-D camera, demonstrate our method's superior success rate and efficiency, especially in complex occlusion conditions, as well as its ability to generalize across different crops without reprogramming. This study advances robotic harvesting by providing a practical "learn from demonstration" (LfD) solution to occlusion challenges, ultimately enhancing autonomous harvesting performance and productivity.
title Enhanced View Planning for Robotic Harvesting: Tackling Occlusions with Imitation Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.10334