Image-guided robotics for the automation of micropropagation

Abstract

Describes a robots workstation used as a test bed for evaluating tools and techniques for automating the technique of micropropagation. A number of novel plant manipulation tools have been developed. These tools are mounted on a Cartesian geometry robot driven by stepper motors to perform the required harvesting, cutting and planting movements. Overall robot direction is provided by a program which is updated according to the shape, position and orientation of a particular microplant. Information from a video camera can either be displayed on a monitor and assessed by an operator, or can be analysed by a vision processing system. This paper describes the robot workstation and discusses the various vision analysis tasks necessary for automatic robot guidance.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>