PhD Defence by Ronja Güldenring

Abstract

Digitalization can pave the way towards more sustainable agriculture. Hereby, agricultural precision robots constitute one solution to enable large-scale organic farming with high yield while having a substantially lower environmental influence.

In this Ph.D. project a visual perception system has been developed to extract plant information on different granularity levels including the overall weed detection of Rumex weeds with bounding boxes, joint stem detection with keypoints as well as the extraction of fine-grained plant traits, such as leaf-, stem- and vein instances. We make the underlying datasets RumexWeeds and RumexLeaves publicly available.

Concretely, the visual perception system is applied to a grassland robot to enable advanced organic weeding methodologies such as laser and electric weeding. It operates in two stages, whereas in the first stage, the weed is identified in the field on a coarse level with a high throughput of hectares per hour. Once a weed is detected, the robot navigates toward the weed to position the weeding unit above. A second camera provides a close-up view of the weed to allow a fine-grained analysis of the plant branching system and the individual leaves of the targeted plant.

Furthermore, fine-grained plant understanding has great usability in other domains such as on-field phenotyping and high-resolution plant monitoring for mixed crop fields combating the severe problems of monocultures.

Supervisors

• Principal supervisor: Professor Lazaros Nalpantidis, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Co-supervisor: Associate Professor Evangelos Boukas, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Co-supervisor: Professor Ole Ravn, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU

Evaluation Board

• Associate Professor Silvia Tolu, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU
• Professor Spyros Fountas, Agricultural University of Athens, Greece
• Professor Ribana Roscher, University of Bonn / Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

Master of the Ceremony

• Associate Professor Xinxin Zhang, Department of Electrical and Photonics Engineering, DTU