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AI4EU Cafe: Project VINUM: Towards Automated Pruning of Grapevines
Grapevine (Vitis) is considered to be one of the major fruit crops worldwide based on hectares cultivated and economic value. While the automation of non-selective vineyard operations has allowed to increase production and reduce costs, there are several selective operations that are difficult to automate. The VINUM project (a collaboration between Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the Università Cattolica del Sacro
Cuore) tackles the problem of automating winter pruning of grapevines.
This talk presents the current progress of the project. I will introduce the overall system consisting of a mobile robot, a manipulator arm with electric shears and perception system, as well as onboard computation and AI. I will illustrate how we use machine learning to perform segmentation and plant organ classification to create a representative model of the grapevine. Pruning rules developed by expert pruners are then used to detect the best pruning points that the manipulator arm uses to perform the cuts. Both wheeled and legged robots are currently evaluated as the mobile platform. Legged robots are promising due to their higher mobility on rough terrains.
and the project website:
