Autonomous Precision Pruning Robot for permanent crops (PruBot)

Vineyard pruning is one of the most critical and labor-intensive tasks as new canes must be carefully removed from the main cane, which affects the vine yield. This domain has significant potential for the European wine production market which, as it accounts for more than 60% of global production. However, vine pruning process has not yet been automated as a pruning machine is expected to decide which canes to be removed and proceed to pruning in a fast and precise manner, similar to humans. From the robotics side, this is an ambitious problem as outdoor agricultural environments are highly unstructured for robotic operation. The PruBot team aims to develop a novel precision pruning system mounted on a commercial tractor and deployed by a robotic manipulator. Our R&D activities will focus on advancing system abilities, in terms of perception, configurability, decisional autonomy, dependability, and self-verification behaviour. These advances will be implemented through the integration of new pruning-tools to a manipulator and augmented with embedded perception systems for pruning, research of advanced outdoor visual perception algorithms for operation in all weather conditions, development of localisation and navigation system with path planning abilities and research of innovative agricultural mission supervisors. The integrated robotic system will be validated in agricultural fields to showcase system's technical feasibility in a realistic environment. Towards this direction, the whole Work Plan of the project is aligned with vineyard's pruning seasons in Spain, France and Italy. To implement the proposed Work Plan, PruBot brings on-board key stakeholders from the entire value chain of agricultural robots, i.e. robotics technology research centers, SMEs with expertise in the development of robotics technology and agricultural machinery, and End-Users with in-depth scientific knowledge in the precision viticulture sector.