학술논문

Can Machines Garden? Systematically Comparing the AlphaGarden vs. Professional Horticulturalists
Document Type
Conference
Source
2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023 IEEE International Conference on. :11779-11785 May, 2023
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Irrigation
Automation
Robot sensing systems
Seeds (agriculture)
Sensors
Videos
Farming
Language
Abstract
The AlphaGarden is an automated testbed for indoor polyculture farming which combines a first-order plant simulator, a gantry robot, a seed planting algorithm, plant phenotyping and tracking algorithms, irrigation sensors and algorithms, and custom pruning tools and algorithms. In this paper, we systematically compare the performance of the AlphaGarden to professional horticulturalists on the staff of the UC Berkeley Oxford Tract Greenhouse. The humans and the machine tend side-by-side polyculture gardens with the same seed arrangement. We compare performance in terms of canopy coverage, plant diversity, and water consumption. Results from two 60-day cycles suggest that the automated AlphaGarden performs comparably to professional horticulturalists in terms of coverage and diversity, and reduces water consumption by as much as 44%. Code, videos, and datasets are available at https//sites.google.com/berkeley.edulsystematiccomparison