TrimBot: a gardening robot for rose, hedge and topiary trimming
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Grant 688007 TrimBot2020 | ![]() |
January 2016 - December 2019
Project members
Funded members:Prof. Dr. Thomas Brox
Nikolaus Mayer
Huizhong Zhou
Artemij Amiranashvili
The TrimBot2020 project
will research the robotics and vision technologies to prototype the first outdoor garden
trimming robot. The robot will navigate over varying terrain, approach rose bushes, hedges and boxwood topiary,
to trim them to an ideal shape. The robot will be based on a modified Bosch Indego robot lawnmower, which will
navigate using a user-defined garden map and 3D scene analysis, and then visually servo a novel electric plant cutter.
Achieving this requires a combination of robotics and 3D computer vision research and innovation activities.
Original developments are required for 3D sensing of semi-regular surfaces with physical texture (overgrown
plant surfaces), coping with outdoor lighting variations, self-localising and navigating over real terrain and around
obstacles, visual servoing to align the vehicle with potentially moving target plants, visual servoing to align leaf
and branch cutters to a compliant surface, and innovative engineering to deliver all this on a small battery-powered
consumer-grade vehicle. |
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More details on the overall project can be found on the consortium page.