Detecção Visual De Fileira De Plantação Com Tarefa Auxiliar De Segmentação Para Navegação De Robôs Móveis

Abstract

Autonomous robots for agricultural tasks have been researched to great extent in the past years as they could result in a great improvement of field efficiency. Navigating an open crop field still is a great challenge. RTK-GNSS is a excellent tool to track the robot's position, but it needs precise mapping and planning while also being expensive and signal dependent. As such, onboard systems that can sense the field directly to guide the robot are a good alternative. Those systems detect the rows with adequate image processing techniques and estimate the position by applying algorithms to the obtained mask, such as the Hough transform or linear regression. In this work, a direct approach is presented by training a neural network model to obtain the position of crop lines directly from an RGB image. While, usually, the camera in these kinds of systems is looking down to the field, a camera near the ground is proposed to take advantage of tunnels or walls of plants formed between rows. A simulation environment for evaluating both the model's performance and camera placement was developed and made available on Github, also four datasets to train the models are proposed, being two for the simulations and two for the real world tests. The results from the simulation are shown across different resolutions and stages of plant growth, indicating the system's capabilities and limitations. Some of the best configurations are then verified in two types of agricultural environments.