Artificial Intelligence Vision Methods for Robotic Harvesting of Edible Flowers

Edible flowers, with their increasing demand in the market, face a challenge in labor-intensive hand-picking practices, hindering their attractiveness for growers. This study explores the application of artificial intelligence vision for robotic harvesting, focusing on the fundamental elements: detection, pose estimation, and plucking point estimation. The objective was to assess the adaptability of this technology across various species and varieties of edible flowers. The developed computer vision framework utilizes YOLOv5 for 2D flower detection and leverages the zero-shot capabilities of the Segmentation Anything Model for extracting points of interest from a 3D point cloud, facilitating 3D space flower localization. Additionally, we provide a pose estimation method, a key factor in plucking point identification. The plucking point is determined through a linear regression correlating flower diameter with the height of the plucking point. The results showed effective 2D detection. Further, the zero-shot and standard machine learning techniques employed achieved promising 3D localization, pose estimation, and plucking point estimation.