Six-armed pollination robot to replace bees
Bees and other natural pollinators are dying out. Robots could replace them, such as the pollination robot Stickbug.
The stickbug robot pollinates flowers.
(Bild: Trevor Smith u. a.)
A research team at West Virginia University has developed a six-armed pollinating robot called Stickbug. In contrast to other pollinating robots, Stickbug is said to be able to pollinate different types of plants more precisely.
The robot has six independently operating robot arms, as the scientists describe in their scientific paper "Design of Stickbug: a Six-Armed Precision Pollination Robot", which has been published as a preprint on Arxiv. With them, the robot can pollinate several flowers at once.
"Stickbug uses a compact holonomic kiwi actuator to navigate through narrow rows of plants, a tall mast to carry multiple manipulators and reach plants at height, a recognition model and classifier to identify blackberry flowers, and a felt-tipped end effector for contact-based pollination," the scientists write in the study. A mast, to which the robot arms are attached, stands on a mobile base with three wheels. The robot can thus drive through rows of plants on largely smooth ground and carry out the pollination process.
The scientists tested the stickbug prototype in a real experiment. At a time when no plants were flowering, they placed the precision pollination robot in front of an artificial blackberry plant. Its task was to pollinate as many flowers as possible within five minutes.
Pollination with 50 percent success
The robot managed to produce more than 1.5 pollinations per minute. According to the researchers, the success rate is 50 percent. The robot recognizes the blackberry blossoms using a RealSense D405 depth camera and LIDAR. Recognition is realized via a computer vision system. An Intel NUC system with Nvidia GPU evaluates the images and controls the six robot arms accordingly. A special, publicly accessible data set was developed to recognize the blackberry blossoms.
To ensure that the six arms do not get in each other's way during pollination, the researchers have equipped the robot with a collision detection system. This prevents the robot arms from colliding during the pollination process.
The researchers have not yet tested Stickbug on real plants. The scientists plan to do this in the next step, which will take place as soon as the blackberry plants have reached the flowering stage. By then, improvements will already have been incorporated into Stickbug. For example, a kind of "flower memory" is to be integrated so that the robot knows which flowers it has already pollinated. The robot should also be able to create a global map of a plant field, which should help it to recognize regions with particularly many flowers and explore parts of the field that have not yet been pollinated.
The researchers see their robot as an option to replace endangered biological pollinators such as bees, some species of moths, butterflies and flies.
(olb)