Tom Botterill
Papers
12
Total Citations
415
H-Index
8
About
Tom Botterill is a leading researcher in agricultural robotics and computer vision, best known for pioneering the first autonomous grape vine pruning system. His work bridges artificial intelligence, 3D reconstruction, and robotic manipulation to solve complex challenges in precision viticulture. His most cited paper, "A Robot System for Pruning Grape Vines" (2016, 218 citations), describes a complete robotic platform that uses trinocular stereo cameras and AI to build 3D vine models and make pruning decisions. This work, alongside his expert system for vine pruning (23 citations), represents a major contribution to automating one of the most labor-intensive tasks in vineyard management. Botterill also made significant advances in robot navigation with his BoWSLAM algorithm (57 citations), which enables reliable monocular visual SLAM in challenging dynamic environments. His speeded-up Bag-of-Words algorithm (37 citations) further improved real-time scene recognition for mobile robots. With over 400 total citations across his publications, Botterill’s research has laid critical groundwork for the next generation of intelligent agricultural robots, combining robust perception, planning, and domain-specific AI to tackle real-world farming problems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1A Robot System for Pruning Grape Vines218 citations · 2016
- 2Bag‐of‐words‐driven, single‐camera simultaneous localization and mapping57 citations · 2010
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- 4An expert system for automatically pruning vines23 citations · 2012
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- 6Finding a vine's structure by bottom-up parsing of cane edges19 citations · 2013
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- 10Visual navigation for mobile robots using the Bag-of-Words algorithm6 citations · 2011