Agritech National Research Center (2022-2025)
Agritech National Research Center is funded by NextGenerationEU (PNRR, Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.4 - D.D. 1032 17/06/2022). The ambition of the center is to develop and deploy key enabling technologies that can allow a profitable advance in productivity, sustainability, ecological and digital transition in the agricultural sector.
RIMLab contributes to the general effort through design and development of a prototype robot for active crop monitoring, automatic data collection and modeling, and fruit sampling. The system integrates a mobile robot base equipped with navigation sensors such as LIDAR, RGB, depth, and multispectral cameras, a manipulator and a soft gripper capable of picking up fruits without damaging them. The system implements the following capabilities.
- Navigation. The robot movement is mainly driven by sensor data acquired by on-board sensors and by crop row and obstacle detection. Integration with GNSS devices is possible.
- Crop model reconstruction and sensor fusion. The data acquired by the robot is used to estimate occupancy and potentially a 3D model of the observed crops.
- Robot manipulation for fruit sampling. The system must be able to detect, reach, and collect individual fruit samples using the robot manipulator and soft gripper. The fruit detection algorithm allows the recognition of fruit instances in the images acquired by the camera and the estimation of their position. Proper planning of the grip configuration and the soft gripper allow grasping without damaging the fruit sample. A significant challenge is due to the occlusion of leaves, the presence of obstacles in the scene, the planning of the movement to detach a fruit from its stem.
