Accurately identifying lychee-picking points in unstructured orchard environments and obtaining their coordinate locations is critical to the success of lychee-picking robots. However, traditional two-dimensional (2D) image-based object detection methods often struggle due to the complex geometric structures of branches, leaves and fruits, leading to incorrect determination of lychee picking points. In this study, we propose a Fcaf3d-lychee network model specifically designed for the accurate localisation of lychee picking points. Point cloud data of lychee picking points in natural environments are acquired using Microsoft's Azure Kinect DK time-of-flight (TOF) camera through multi-view stitching. We augment the Fully Convolutional Anchor-Free 3D Object Detection (Fcaf3d) model with a squeeze-and-excitation(SE) module, which exploits human visual attention mechanisms for improved feature extraction of lychee picking points. The trained network model is evaluated on a test set of lychee-picking locations and achieves an impressive F1 score of 88.57%, significantly outperforming existing models. Subsequent three-dimensional (3D) position detection of picking points in real lychee orchard environments yields high accuracy, even under varying degrees of occlusion. Localisation errors of lychee picking points are within 1.5 cm in all directions, demonstrating the robustness and generality of the model.

Accurate reconstruction of plant models for phenotyping analysis is critical for optimising sustainable agricultural practices in precision agriculture. Traditional laboratory-based phenotyping, while valuable, falls short of understanding how plants grow under uncontrolled conditions. Robotic technologies offer a promising avenue for large-scale, direct phenotyping in real-world environments. This study explores the deployment of emerging robotics and digital technology in plant phenotyping to improve performance and efficiency. Three critical functional modules: environmental understanding, robotic motion planning, and in-situ phenotyping, are introduced to automate the entire process. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in agricultural environments. The pheno-robot system autonomously collects high-quality data by navigating around plants. In addition, the in-situ modelling model reconstructs high-quality plant models from the data collected by the robot. The developed robotic system shows high efficiency and robustness, demonstrating its potential to advance plant science in real-world agricultural environments.

Agricultural robots must navigate challenging dynamic and semi-structured environments. Recently, environmental modeling using LiDAR-based SLAM has shown promise in providing highly accurate geometry. However, how this chaotic environmental information can be used to achieve effective robot automation in the agricultural sector remains unexplored. In this study, we propose a novel semantic mapping and navigation framework for achieving robotic autonomy in orchards. It consists of two main components: a semantic processing module and a navigation module. First, we present a novel 3D detection network architecture, 3D-ODN, which can accurately process object instance information from point clouds. Second, we develop a framework to construct the visibility map by incorporating semantic information and terrain analysis. By combining these two critical components, our framework is evaluated in a number of key horticultural production scenarios, including a robotic system for in-situ phenotyping and daily monitoring, and a selective harvesting system in apple orchards. The experimental results show that our method can ensure high accuracy in understanding the environment and enable reliable robot autonomy in agricultural environments.

Accurate reconstruction of plant phenotypes plays a key role in optimising sustainable farming practices in the field of Precision Agriculture (PA). Currently, optical sensor-based approaches dominate the field, but the need for high-fidelity 3D reconstruction of crops and plants in unstructured agricultural environments remains challenging. Recently, a promising development has emerged in the form of Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), a novel method that utilises neural density fields. This technique has shown impressive performance in various novel vision synthesis tasks, but has remained relatively unexplored in the agricultural context. In our study, we focus on two fundamental tasks within plant phenotyping: (1) the synthesis of 2D novel-view images and (2) the 3D reconstruction of crop and plant models. We explore the world of neural radiance fields, in particular two SOTA methods: Instant-NGP, which excels in generating high-quality images with impressive training and inference speed, and Instant-NSR, which improves the reconstructed geometry by incorporating the Signed Distance Function (SDF) during training. In particular, we present a novel plant phenotype dataset comprising real plant images from production environments. This dataset is a first-of-its-kind initiative aimed at comprehensively exploring the advantages and limitations of NeRF in agricultural contexts. Our experimental results show that NeRF demonstrates commendable performance in the synthesis of novel-view images and is able to achieve reconstruction results that are competitive with Reality Capture, a leading commercial software for 3D Multi-View Stereo (MVS)-based reconstruction. However, our study also highlights certain drawbacks of NeRF, including relatively slow training speeds, performance limitations in cases of insufficient sampling, and challenges in obtaining geometry quality in complex setups.