AlphaGarden: Learning to Autonomously Tend a Polyculture Garden

Abstract-- This paper presents AlphaGarden: an autonomous polyculture garden that prunes and irrigates living plants in a 1.5m 3.0m physical testbed. AlphaGarden uses an overhead camera and sensors to track the plant distribution and soil moisture. We model individual plant growth and interplant dynamics to train a policy that chooses actions to maximize leaf coverage and diversity. For autonomous pruning, AlphaGarden uses two custom-designed pruning tools and a trained neural network to detect prune points. Results suggest AlphaGarden can autonomously achieve 0.96 normalized diversity with pruning shears while maintaining an average canopy coverage of 0.86 during the peak of the cycle. Industrial agriculture is based on monoculture, where a single crop type is cultivated, requiring substantial use of, pesticides, and water [1], [2].