A Ground Mobile Robot for Autonomous Terrestrial Laser Scanning‐Based Field Phenotyping

Abstract

ABSTRACT Conventional field phenotyping methods are typically manual, time‐consuming, and destructive, creating a bottleneck for breeding progress. To address this challenge, robotics and automation technologies offer efficient sensing tools to monitor field evolution and crop development throughout the season. This study presents an end‐to‐end automated pipeline for terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) in plant breeding trials, built around a Husky ground robot equipped with a high‐resolution survey‐grade FARO 3D LiDAR scanner. Unlike prior TLS phenotyping approaches relying on manual scan placement or heuristic site selection, our system integrates a novel analytical 3D ray‐casting method for optimized TLS site planning with an offline route optimization algorithm that accounts for crop growth stages and field accessibility constraints. This enables efficient planning in complex breeding environments, reduces manual labor, and improves data collection efficiency, addressing scalability challenges in large breeding trials. Leveraging Real Time Kinematic‐Global Navigation Satellite System (RTK‐GNSS) and sensor fusion, the system achieved average errors below 0.6 cm for position and for heading, enabling point cloud registration with mean errors around 2 cm, comparable to traditional manual methods that require artificial targets. The platform was successfully deployed and evaluated in two distinct cotton breeding field layouts, demonstrating the platform's capability to autonomously collect accurate TLS data for quantitative plant phenotyping across varying plot configurations. The proposed autonomous phenotyping system advances scalable, efficient phenotyping workflows to support breeding programs for crop improvement, highlighting the potential for broader deployment in field phenomics.

Plant phenotyping relevance

植物育種試験向けの自律走行TLS・LiDAR計測プラットフォームと、3D計画・経路最適化・データ収集の技術的評価が中心であり、定量的植物表現型取得を目的とする。

Code and data availability

The article describes an autonomous TLS phenotyping robot and its field experiments, but no public phenotype datasets, point clouds, author analysis code, or trained models are disclosed. The only repository URL mentioned (https://github.com/husky/husky) refers to the vendor's generic ROS packages for the Husky A200, a

No evidence-backed public reproduction asset is currently recorded.