Autonomous pollination of individual kiwifruit flowers: Toward a robotic kiwifruit pollinator

There is an increasing concern that the traditional approach of natural kiwifruit pollination by bees may not be sustainable. The alternatives are currently too costly for most growers due to high labor requirements or inefficient usage of expensive pollen. This paper presents a performance evaluati...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of field robotics Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 246 - 262
Main Authors Williams, Henry, Nejati, Mahla, Hussein, Salome, Penhall, Nicky, Lim, Jong Yoon, Jones, Mark Hedley, Bell, Jamie, Ahn, Ho Seok, Bradley, Stuart, Schaare, Peter, Martinsen, Paul, Alomar, Mohammad, Patel, Purak, Seabright, Matthew, Duke, Mike, Scarfe, Alistair, MacDonald, Bruce
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.03.2020
Subjects
Artificial neural networks
Bees
Convolution
convolution neural networks
Flowers
horticulture
Kiwifruit
Machine vision
neural networking
orchards
Performance evaluation
Plant reproduction
Pollen
pollination
robotics
Robots
Vision systems
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Summary:There is an increasing concern that the traditional approach of natural kiwifruit pollination by bees may not be sustainable. The alternatives are currently too costly for most growers due to high labor requirements or inefficient usage of expensive pollen. This paper presents a performance evaluation of a novel kiwifruit pollinating robot designed to provide a more efficient, reliable, and cost‐effective means of producing kiwifruit. The robot comprises a novel air‐assisted sprayer, a machine vision system employing convolution neural networks, and a flower targeting system for efficient and effective application of pollen to individual flowers. We show that this pollination system is capable of individually targeting and pollinating 79.5% of flowers at 3.5 km/hr while using comparable amounts of pollen to commercial Cambrian operators. Furthermore, flowers that were successfully pollinated at 1 km/hr grew into the first robotically pollinated kiwifruit which were comparable in quality to commercially grown kiwifruit. However, the overall fruit set was found to be well below commercial requirements and further work on increasing the overall yield is required.
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ISSN:1556-4959
1556-4967
DOI:10.1002/rob.21861