TRX'22 - Prof. Amir Degani, "Aerial & Ground Vehicle Collaboration in Agricultural Applications"

Amir Degani is a professor in the Technion Faculty of Civil Engineering and the director of the Civil, Environmental, & Agricultural Robotics (CEAR) Lab.

Title: Aerial & Ground Vehicle Collaboration in Agricultural Applications
Abstract: This talk will present some challenges in the use of robots in agricultural applications, exemplified by a method for localization of ground mobile robots in orchards. The typical localization approaches are not adjusted to the characteristics of the orchard environment, especially the homogeneous scenery. To alleviate these difficulties, we propose to use top-view images of the orchard acquired in real-time. The top-view observation of the orchard provides a unique signature of every tree formed by the shape of its canopy. This practically changes the homogeneity premise in orchards and paves the way for addressing the kidnapped robot problem. We first construct a "virtual-canopies laser scan" around the ground robot which is generated from low-altitude top-view video streams. We apply Monte Carlo Localization on this virtual scan to localize the robot against a high-altitude top-view snapshot image which is used as a map. The suggested approach is examined in numerous offline experiments conducted on data acquired in real orchards and is compared against a typical simulated approach which relies on ground-level trunk observations. The canopy-based approach demonstrated better performance in all measures, including convergence to centimeter-level accuracy.

Date: June 12th, 2022
Location: Taub Faculty of Computer Science