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Robotic Sensing and Stimuli Provision for Guided Plant Growth
Published on: July 1, 2019
YOLOv8-PnP fusion architecture for non-contact robotic pollination: a 6D pose estimation approach for autonomous
Rajmeet Singh1, Manveen Kaur2, Appaso M Gadade3
1Khalifa University Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KUCARS), Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.
Background:
The declining availability of natural pollinators and limitations of contact-based robotic pollination methods including flower damage, pathogen transmission, and reduced operational efficiency necessitate innovative solutions for protected horticulture.
Gap:
Existing robotic pollinators achieve limited success rates (∼ 66%) primarily due to inaccurate 6D flower pose estimation, while current airflow-based systems lack precise positioning capabilities.
Contribution:
This study presents a novel YOLOv8-PnP hybrid framework integrating real-time object detection with 6 degree of freedom pose estimation for precision airflow based pollination. The system employs a custom-designed Air Pollenmatic end-effector integrated with a Hello Robot Stretch platform through ROS-based visual servoing control.
Results:
Validation on 2,100 annotated greenhouse images demonstrated 95.8% precision, 94.6% recall, and 97.7% mAP@0.5 at 28.5 FPS (11.1 ms inference). Field trials achieved 92.5% pollination attempt rate and 85.6% success rate, yielding 79.2% overall efficacy-an 8.3 percentage point improvement over contact-based methods.
Impact:
This contactless approach eliminates mechanical flower damage, reduces disease transmission risk, and advances the feasibility of fully autonomous greenhouse pollination systems.
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