Multimodal Sensing for Individual Plant Phenotyping in Agriculture Robotics

The ANTONIO (Multimodal Sensing for Individual Plant Phenotyping in Agriculture Robotics) project isdeveloped and implement a multi-sensor system to enable agri-robots to perform plant phenotyping andprecision agriculture tasks. The system includes mobile sensors mounted on ground robots and drones, whichprovide high-throughput crop assessment and enable precision farming applications. The sensors includeLIDAR, RGB/NIR cameras, stereo cameras/RGB-D sensors, multispectral cameras, thermographic vision,wheel encoders, and accelerometers/torque sensors. The sensory data is used for subsequent higher levelprocessing steps, such as 3D mapping, situation awareness, crop assessment and recognition, andtraversability assessment. The ANTONIO system helps to apply pesticides or fertilizers where needed, monitorcrop health and yield estimation, inspect remote parts of the field, and enable controlled traffic farming. Sensorfusion techniques are also used to derive virtual sensors that compute information that would be too complexor expensive to obtain directly. Overall, the project provides a comprehensive solution for precision agriculture,enabling the optimization of crop yields and reducing the environmental impact of farming practices.