Communications of the ACM
Meet Edinburgh's 'Trimbot,' the Rose Pruning, Bush Trimming Auto-Gardening Robot
Robotics specialists have created a self-navigating automated gardening robot.
Credit: The University of Edinburgh
Researchers have developed a self-guiding gardening robot that navigates via five pairs of cameras and three-dimensional (3D) mapping.
The eight partner teams that contributed to the research during the four-year project funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 program included scientists from the University of Edinburgh in the U.K.; Wageningen University & Research and the universities of Amsterdam and Groningen in the Netherlands; the German University of Freiburg; ETH Zurich in Switzerland; and technology company Bosch.
The Trimbot, which must be preprogrammed with a rough scheme of the garden it must maintain, employs algorithms to compare overgrown bushes with desired final shapes as it cuts, and uses automated secateurs (pruning shears) to prune roses at precise positions on each plant’s stem.
Edinburgh's Bob Fisher said the researchers “developed new robotics and 3D computer-vision technology to enable it to work outdoors in changing lighting and environmental conditions."
From The Scotsman (UK)
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA
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