Attention-driven Next-best-view Planning for Efficient Reconstruction of Plants and Targeted Plant Parts

Abstract

Robots in tomato greenhouses need to perceive the plant and plant parts accurately to automate monitoring, harvesting, and de-leafing tasks. Existing perception systems struggle with the high levels of occlusion in plants and often result in poor perception accuracy. One reason for this is because they use fixed cameras or predefined camera movements. Next-best-view (NBV) planning presents an alternate approach, in which the camera viewpoints are reasoned and strategically planned such that the perception accuracy is improved. However, existing NBV-planning algorithms are agnostic to the task-at-hand and give equal importance to all the plant parts. This strategy is inefficient for greenhouse tasks that require targeted perception of specific plant parts, such as the perception of leaf nodes for de-leafing. To improve targeted perception in complex greenhouse environments, NBV planning algorithms need an attention mechanism to focus on the task-relevant plant parts. In this paper, the role of attention in improving targeted perception using an attention-driven NBV planning strategy was investigated. Through simulation experiments using plants with high levels of occlusion and structural complexity, it was shown that focusing attention on task-relevant plant parts can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of 3D reconstruction. Further, with real-world experiments, it was shown that these benefits extend to complex greenhouse conditions with natural variation and occlusion, natural illumination, sensor noise, and uncertainty in camera poses. The results clearly indicate that using attention-driven NBV planning in greenhouses can significantly improve the efficiency of perception and enhance the performance of robotic systems in greenhouse crop production.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物の3D再構成を効率化する注意機構付きNBV計画を開発・実験検証しており、植物部位の知覚・形状取得が中心的な方法論的貢献である。

Code and data availability

The paper describes simulation and real-world greenhouse NBV-planning experiments, but no blocks contain an explicit public data or code availability statement, repository link, or deposited dataset. The only URLs in the text are generic tool references (Gazebo, ROS, MoveIt) and a third-party commercial 3D tomato model

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