Automated Pruning of Polyculture Plants
This addresses the labor challenge for polyculture farmers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing robotics and AI methods.
The paper tackles the problem of automated pruning in polyculture farming, which is more labor-intensive than monoculture, by developing hardware and algorithms that achieved 0.94 normalized plant diversity and 0.84 average canopy coverage over four 60-day cycles.
Polyculture farming has environmental advantages but requires substantially more pruning than monoculture farming. We present novel hardware and algorithms for automated pruning. Using an overhead camera to collect data from a physical scale garden testbed, the autonomous system utilizes a learned Plant Phenotyping convolutional neural network and a Bounding Disk Tracking algorithm to evaluate the individual plant distribution and estimate the state of the garden each day. From this garden state, AlphaGardenSim selects plants to autonomously prune. A trained neural network detects and targets specific prune points on the plant. Two custom-designed pruning tools, compatible with a FarmBot gantry system, are experimentally evaluated and execute autonomous cuts through controlled algorithms. We present results for four 60-day garden cycles. Results suggest the system can autonomously achieve 0.94 normalized plant diversity with pruning shears while maintaining an average canopy coverage of 0.84 by the end of the cycles. For code, videos, and datasets, see https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/pruningpolyculture.