12 accepted papers
Agricultural robots have the potential to improve the efficiency and sustainability of existing agricultural practices. Most autonomous agricultural robots rely on machine vision systems. Such systems, however, often perform worse in new fields or when the robotic platforms change. While we can alle
Monitoring of fields and breeding plots is critical for farmers, plant scientists, and breeders. In this process, a key objective is to assess and monitor the growth stages together with the number of individual plants on the field. Traditionally, this in-field assessment is performed manually and t
Annotated datasets are essential for supervised learning. However, annotating large datasets is a tedious and time-intensive task. This paper addresses active learning in the context of semantic segmentation with the goal of reducing the human labeling effort. Our application is agricultural robotic…
Crops are an important source of food and other products. In conventional farming, tractors apply large amounts of agrochemicals uniformly across fields for weed control and plant protection. Autonomous farming robots have the potential to provide environment-friendly weed control on a per plant bas…
Mapping and localization are essential capabilities of robotic systems. Although the majority of mapping systems focus on static environments, the deployment in real-world situations requires them to handle dynamic objects. In this paper, we propose an approach for an RGB-D sensor that is able to co…
Localization is a pre-requisite for most autonomous robots. For example, to carry out precision agriculture tasks effectively, a robot must be able to localize itself accurately in crop fields. The crop field environment presents unique challenges such as the highly repetitive structure of the crops…
Reducing the use of agrochemicals is an important component toward sustainable agriculture. Robots that can perform targeted weed control offer the potential to contribute to this goal, for example, through specialized weeding actions such as selective spraying or mechanical weed removal. A prerequi
Applying agrochemicals is the default procedure for conventional weed control in crop production, but has negative impacts on the environment. Robots have the potential to treat every plant in the field individually and thus can reduce the required use of such chemicals. To achieve that, robots need…
Precision farming robots, which target to reduce the amount of herbicides that need to be brought out in the fields, must have the ability to identify crops and weeds in real time to trigger weeding actions. In this paper, we address the problem of CNN-based semantic segmentation of crop fields sepa…
Precision farming robots offer a great potential for reducing the amount of agro-chemicals that is required in the fields through a targeted, per-plant intervention. To achieve this, robots must be able to reliably distinguish crops from weeds on different fields and across growth stages. In this pa…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other robots in smart farming applications offer the potential to monitor farm land on a per-plant basis, which in turn can reduce the amount of herbicides and pesticides that must be applied. A central information for the farmer as well as for autonomous agricult…
Robots for precision farming have the potential to reduce the reliance on herbicides and pesticides through selectively spraying individual plants or through manual weed removal. To achieve this, the value crops and the weeds must be identified by the robot's perception system to trigger the actuato