Monday, January 26, 2009

Agricultural machine vision

You know that I like to share stories of machine vision being used outside of conventional industrial applications. Well how about pruning grape vines? The article, “Robots on the Vine” in MechatronicsZone describes just such a system put together to automate an age-old, and highly labor-intensive, manual task.

The company responsible,
Vision Robotics, out of San Diego, CA, is coy about just how their system works, but do admit to using stereo vision, which presumably determines the position of each branch to be pruned. As yet the system can only operate on level ground, but once they conquer inclined surfaces I envisage a horde of unemployed vine-pruners marching on the developers’ offices.

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