Safe Leaf Manipulation for Accurate Shape and Pose Estimation of Occluded Fruits




Authors:

S. Yao, S. Pan, M. Bennewitz, K. Hauser

Type:

Preprint

Published in:

Arxiv Pre-print

Year:

2024

Related Projects:

AID4Crops - Automation and AI for Monitoring and Decision Making of Horticultural Crops

Links:

Preprint

BibTex String

@article{yao2024safe,
title={Safe Leaf Manipulation for Accurate Shape and Pose Estimation of Occluded Fruits},
author={Yao, Shaoxiong and Pan, Sicong and Bennewitz, Maren and Hauser, Kris},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv: 2409.17389}
year={2024}
}
Topic

Abstract:

Fruit monitoring plays an important role in crop management, and rising global fruit consumption combined with labor shortages necessitates automated monitoring with robots. However, occlusions from plant foliage often hinder accurate shape and pose estimation. Therefore, we propose an active fruit shape and pose estimation method that physically manipulates occluding leaves to reveal hidden fruits. This paper introduces a framework that plans robot actions to maximize visibility and minimize leaf damage. We developed a novel scene-consistent shape completion technique to improve fruit estimation under heavy occlusion and utilize a perception-driven deformation graph model to predict leaf deformation during planning. Experiments on artificial and real sweet pepper plants demonstrate that our method enables robots to safely move leaves aside, exposing fruits for accurate shape and pose estimation, outperforming baseline methods. Project page: https://shaoxiongyao.github.io/lmap-ssc/.