Design of an Autonomous Precision Pollination Robot
This addresses the need for reliable pollination in agriculture to support food production, but it is an incremental application of existing robotics techniques to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of declining natural pollinators by designing an autonomous robot, BrambleBee, for pollinating bramble plants in greenhouses, aiming to improve efficiency and uniformity in pollination.
Precision robotic pollination systems can not only fill the gap of declining natural pollinators, but can also surpass them in efficiency and uniformity, helping to feed the fast-growing human population on Earth. This paper presents the design and ongoing development of an autonomous robot named "BrambleBee", which aims at pollinating bramble plants in a greenhouse environment. Partially inspired by the ecology and behavior of bees, BrambleBee employs state-of-the-art localization and mapping, visual perception, path planning, motion control, and manipulation techniques to create an efficient and robust autonomous pollination system.