Development of a Mobile Robotic Phenotyping System for Growth Chamber-based Studies of Genotype x Environment Interactions. Issue 16 (2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shah, D.; Tang, L.; Gai, Jingyao; Putta-Venkata, R.
• Is Part Of: IFAC-PapersOnLine. Volume 49:Issue 16(2016)
• Page Start: 248
• Page End: 253
• Publication Date: 2016
• Subjects: 3D Reconstruction -- Phenotyping -- Mobile robots -- Robot arm -- Robot probing -- Growth chamber; Automatic control -- Periodicals; 629.805
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ifacol.2016.10.046
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2405-8963

Abstract

Abstract: To increase understanding of the interaction between phenotype and genotype x environment to improve crop performance, large amounts of phenotypic data are needed. Studying plants of a given strain under multiple environments can greatly help to reveal their interactions. To collect the labor-intensive data required to perform experiments in this area, a Mecanum-wheeled, magnetic-tape-following indoor rover has been developed to accurately and autonomously move between and inside growth chambers. Integration of the motor controllers, a robot arm, and a Microsoft Kinect (v2) 3D sensor was achieved in a customized C++ program. Detecting and segmenting plants in a multi-plant environment is a challenging task, which can be aided by integration of depth data into these algorithms. Image-processing functions were implemented to filter the depth image to minimize noise and remove undesired surfaces, reducing the memory requirement and allowing the plant to be reconstructed at a higher resolution in real-time. Three-dimensional meshes representing plants inside the chamber were reconstructed using the Kinect SDK's KinectFusion. After transforming user-selected points in camera coordinates to robot-arm coordinates, the robot arm is used in conjunction with the rover to probe desired leaves, simulating the future use of sensors such as a fluorimeter and Raman spectrometer. This paper reports the system architecture and some preliminary results of the system.