Title :
Image-guided robotics for the automation of micropropagation
Author :
Tillett, R. ; Brown, F. ; McFarlane, N.B. ; Onyango, C. ; Davis, P. ; Marchant, J.
Author_Institution :
Agric. & Food Res. Council, Inst. of Eng. Res., Bedford, UK
Abstract :
Describes a robots workstation used as a test bed for evaluating tools and techniques for automating the technique of micropropagation. A number of novel plant manipulation tools have been developed. These tools are mounted on a Cartesian geometry robot driven by stepper motors to perform the required harvesting, cutting and planting movements. Overall robot direction is provided by a program which is updated according to the shape, position and orientation of a particular microplant. Information from a video camera can either be displayed on a monitor and assessed by an operator, or can be analysed by a vision processing system. This paper describes the robot workstation and discusses the various vision analysis tasks necessary for automatic robot guidance
Keywords :
agriculture; computer vision; position control; robots; Cartesian geometry robot; agriculture; cutting; harvesting; image guided robots; machine vision; micropropagation automation; plant manipulation tools; planting movements; robots workstation; video camera; vision analysis tasks; Automatic testing; Cameras; Computational geometry; Information analysis; Machine vision; Monitoring; Robot vision systems; Robotics and automation; Shape; Workstations;
Conference_Titel :
Intelligent Robots and Systems '90. 'Towards a New Frontier of Applications', Proceedings. IROS '90. IEEE International Workshop on
Conference_Location :
Ibaraki
DOI :
10.1109/IROS.1990.262396
