Abstract
Data-driven robotic systems are imperative in precision agriculture. Currently, Agri-Robot precision sprayers lack automated methods to assess the efficacy of their spraying. In this paper, images were collected from an RGB camera mounted to an Agri-robot system to locate spray deposits on target weeds or non-target lettuces. We propose an explainable deep learning pipeline to classify and localise spray deposits without using existing manual agricultural methods. We implement a novel stratification and sampling methodology to improve classification results. Spray deposits are identified with over 90% Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic and over 50% Intersection over Union for a Weakly Supervised Object Localisation task. This approach utilises near real-time architectures and methods to achieve inference for both classification and localisation in 0.062 s on average.
This work is supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/S023917/1]. This work is also supported by Syngenta as the Industrial partner.
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Rogers, H., De La Iglesia, B., Zebin, T., Cielniak, G., Magri, B. (2023). An Automated Precision Spraying Evaluation System. In: Iida, F., Maiolino, P., Abdulali, A., Wang, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 14136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43360-3_3
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