26 accepted papers
Crop yield estimation is a relevant problem in agriculture, because an accurate yield estimate can support farmers’ decisions on harvesting or precision intervention. Robots can help to automate this process. To do so, they need to be able to perceive the surrounding environment to identify target o
As the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, our agricultural production system needs to double its productivity despite a decline of human workforce in the agricultural sector. Autonomous robotic systems are one promising pathway to increase productivity by taking over labor-int
Automatic fruit growth monitoring plays a vital role in advancing precision agriculture. Tracking the evolution of fruits over time is essential to monitor their development and optimize production. The ability to recognize fruits over periods of time, even with drastic scene changes, is a required
The natural world presents complex organic structures, such as tree canopies, that humans can interpret even when only partially visible.Understanding tree structures is key for forest monitoring, orchard management, and automated harvesting applications.However, reconstructing tree topologies from…
Conventional crop production, which is essential for providing food, feed, fuel, and fiber for our society, relies heavily on harmful herbicides to control weeds. Instead, agricultural robots could remove weeds more sustainably. However, these robots require a generalizable perception system that ca
Agricultural production is facing challenges in the next decades induced by climate change and the need for more sustainability by reducing its impact on the environment. Advances in field management through robotic intervention, monitoring of crops by autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) supp…
Autonomousrobots are often employed for data collection due to their efficiency and low labour costs. A key task in robotic data acquisition is planning paths through an initially unknown environment to collect observations given platform-specific resource constraints, such as limited battery life.
Robots that operate in agricultural environments need a robust perception system that can deal with occlusions, which are naturally present in agricultural scenarios. In this paper, we address the problem of estimating 3D shapes of fruits when only partial observations are available. Generally speak…
The world population is increasing and will, by 2050, nearly double its demand for food, feed, fuel, and fiber. Besides environmental challenges, labor shortage also poses crucial challenges to the agricultural production system. Automation of manual tasks in crop production can potentially increase
Interpreting camera data is key for autonomously acting systems such as autonomous vehicles. Vision systems that operate in real-world environments must be able to understand their surroundings and need the ability to deal with novel situations. This paper tackles open-world semantic segmentation i.…
Semantic segmentation enables robots to perceive and reason about their environments beyond geometry. Most of such systems build upon deep learning approaches. As autonomous robots are commonly deployed in initially unknown environments, pre-training on static datasets cannot always capture the vari
Monitoring the traits of plants and fruits is a fundamental task in horticulture. With accurate measurements, farmers can predict the yield of their crops and use this information for making informed management decisions, and breeders can use it for variety selection. Agricultural robotic applicatio…
Plant phenotyping is a central task in agriculture, as it describes plants' growth stage, development, and other relevant quantities. Robots can help automate this process by accurately estimating plant traits such as the number of leaves, leaf area, and the plant size. In this paper, we address the…
Measuring plant traits with high throughput allows breeders to monitor and select the best cultivars for subsequent breeding generations. This can enable farmers to improve yield to produce more food, feed, and fiber. Current breeding practices involve extracting leaf parameters on a small subset of
Agricultural robots have the prospect to enable more efficient and sustainable agricultural production of food, feed, and fiber. Perception of crops and weeds is a central component of agricultural robots that aim to monitor fields and assess the plants as well as their growth stage in an automatic…
Monitoring plants and fruits at high resolution play a key role in the future of agriculture. Accurate 3D information can pave the way to a diverse number of robotic applications in agriculture ranging from autonomous harvesting to precise yield estimation. Obtaining such 3D information is non-trivi…
Perception is crucial for robots that act in real-world environments, as autonomous systems need to see and understand the world around them to act properly. Panoptic segmentation provides an interpretation of the scene by computing a pixelwise semantic label together with instance IDs. In this pape…
Crop inspection is a critical part of modern agricultural practices that helps farmers assess the current status of a field and then make crop management decisions. Current crop inspection methods are labour-intensive tasks, which makes them rather slow and expensive to apply. In this paper, we expl…
Precision farming robots offer the potential to reduce the amount of used agrochemicals through targeted interventions and thus are a promising step towards sustainable agriculture. A prerequisite for such systems is a robust plant classification system that can identify crops and weeds in various a
Crops for food, feed, fiber, and fuel are key natural resources for our society. Monitoring plants and measuring their traits is an important task in agriculture often referred to as plant phenotyping. Traditionally, this task is done manually, which is time- and labor-intensive. Robots can automate
Monitoring plants and fruits is important in modern agriculture, with applications ranging from high-throughput phenotyping to autonomous harvesting. Obtaining highly accurate 3D measurements under real agricultural conditions is a challenging task. In this letter, we address the problem of estimati
Semantic segmentation of aerial imagery is an important tool for mapping and earth observation. However, supervised deep learning models for segmentation rely on large amounts of high-quality labelled data, which is labour-intensive and time-consuming to generate. To address this, we propose a new a…
Monitoring individual plants and computing precise 3D reconstructions is highly relevant for crop breeding. In the conventional breeding approach, humans measure phenotypic traits by hand, requiring substantial manual labor. This paper addresses precise 3D plant reconstructions in a crop field or br…
In modern agriculture, measuring phenotypic traits helps breeders monitor plant growth, increase yield, and provide food, feed, and fiber. Traditional phenotyping requires intensive manual work, partially being intrusive. In this paper, we investigate the challenge of measuring phenotypic traits in…
Plant phenotyping, i.e., the task of measuring plant traits to describe the anatomy and physiology of plants, is a central task in crop science and plant breeding. Standard methods often require intrusive or time-consuming operations involving a lot of manual labor. Cameras or range sensors, paired…