Chris McCool
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View article: A Generalized Concept for Clustering Capabilities of Weeding Robots
A Generalized Concept for Clustering Capabilities of Weeding Robots Open
Agriculture is undergoing a significant transformation process with the help of robots. Weeding robots have made their way into the market, and they play a crucial role in automating the weeding process in the field. This study introduces …
View article: A Dataset and Benchmark for Shape Completion of Fruits for Agricultural Robotics
A Dataset and Benchmark for Shape Completion of Fruits for Agricultural Robotics Open
As the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, our agricultural production system needs to double its productivity despite a decline of human workforce in the agricultural sector. Autonomous robotic systems are one promis…
View article: BonnBot-I Plus: A Bio-diversity Aware Precise Weed Management Robotic Platform
BonnBot-I Plus: A Bio-diversity Aware Precise Weed Management Robotic Platform Open
In this article, we focus on the critical tasks of plant protection in arable farms, addressing a modern challenge in agriculture: integrating ecological considerations into the operational strategy of precision weeding robots like \bbot. …
View article: Research priorities to leverage smart digital technologies for sustainable crop production
Research priorities to leverage smart digital technologies for sustainable crop production Open
Agriculture faces several challenges including climate change and biodiversity loss while, at the same time, the demand for food, feed, biofuels, and fiber is increasing. Sustainable intensification aims to increase productivity and input-…
View article: P225 Airway disease in pulmonary sarcoidosis
P225 Airway disease in pulmonary sarcoidosis Open
Aims Airway involvement in sarcoidosis is less common than nodal and lung parenchymal disease. It may result in airflow limitation which has been reported with increased morbidity and mortality. We aim to interrogate large cohorts to asses…
View article: P195 Lung texture analysis in pulmonary fibrosis and emphysema
P195 Lung texture analysis in pulmonary fibrosis and emphysema Open
Aims Computed Tomography (CT) has a pivotal role in the diagnosis of Interstitial Lung Disease (ILD). Visual evaluation of ILD by CT is prone to high rates of inter-reader variability. The co-existence of emphysema and fibrosis can make th…
View article: PAg-NeRF: Towards fast and efficient end-to-end panoptic 3D representations for agricultural robotics
PAg-NeRF: Towards fast and efficient end-to-end panoptic 3D representations for agricultural robotics Open
Precise scene understanding is key for most robot monitoring and intervention tasks in agriculture. In this work we present PAg-NeRF which is a novel NeRF-based system that enables 3D panoptic scene understanding. Our representation is tra…
View article: BonnBot-I: A Precise Weed Management and Crop Monitoring Platform
BonnBot-I: A Precise Weed Management and Crop Monitoring Platform Open
Cultivation and weeding are two of the primary tasks performed by farmers today. A recent challenge for weeding is the desire to reduce herbicide and pesticide treatments while maintaining crop quality and quantity. In this paper, we intro…
View article: Panoptic Mapping with Fruit Completion and Pose Estimation for Horticultural Robots
Panoptic Mapping with Fruit Completion and Pose Estimation for Horticultural Robots Open
Monitoring plants and fruits at high resolution play a key role in the future of agriculture. Accurate 3D information can pave the way to a diverse number of robotic applications in agriculture ranging from autonomous harvesting to precise…
View article: Panoptic One-Click Segmentation: Applied to Agricultural Data
Panoptic One-Click Segmentation: Applied to Agricultural Data Open
In weed control, precision agriculture can help to greatly reduce the use of\nherbicides, resulting in both economical and ecological benefits. A key element\nis the ability to locate and segment all the plants from image data. Modern\nins…
View article: Explicitly incorporating spatial information to recurrent networks for agriculture
Explicitly incorporating spatial information to recurrent networks for agriculture Open
In agriculture, the majority of vision systems perform still image classification. Yet, recent work has highlighted the potential of spatial and temporal cues as a rich source of information to improve the classification performance. In th…
View article: Crop Agnostic Monitoring Driven by Deep Learning
Crop Agnostic Monitoring Driven by Deep Learning Open
Farmers require diverse and complex information to make agronomical decisions about crop management including intervention tasks. Generally, this information is gathered by farmers traversing their fields or glasshouses which is often a ti…
View article: Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Size and Position Estimation
Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Size and Position Estimation Open
Modern agricultural applications require knowledge about the position and size of fruits on plants. However, occlusions from leaves typically make obtaining this information difficult. We present a novel viewpoint planning approach that bu…
View article: Towards Autonomous Crop-Agnostic Visual Navigation in Arable Fields.
Towards Autonomous Crop-Agnostic Visual Navigation in Arable Fields. Open
Autonomous navigation of a robot in agricultural fields is essential for every task from crop monitoring through to weed management and fertilizer application. Many current approaches rely on accurate GPS, however, such technology is expen…
View article: Towards Autonomous Visual Navigation in Arable Fields
Towards Autonomous Visual Navigation in Arable Fields Open
Autonomous navigation of a robot in agricultural fields is essential for every task from crop monitoring to weed management and fertilizer application. Many current approaches rely on accurate GPS, however, such technology is expensive and…
View article: Combining Local and Global Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Coverage
Combining Local and Global Viewpoint Planning for Fruit Coverage Open
Obtaining 3D sensor data of complete plants or plant parts (e.g., the crop or fruit) is difficult due to their complex structure and a high degree of occlusion. However, especially for the estimation of the position and size of fruits, it …
View article: Virtual Temporal Samples for Recurrent Neural Networks: applied to\n semantic segmentation in agriculture
Virtual Temporal Samples for Recurrent Neural Networks: applied to\n semantic segmentation in agriculture Open
This paper explores the potential for performing temporal semantic\nsegmentation in the context of agricultural robotics without temporally\nlabelled data. We achieve this by proposing to generate virtual temporal\nsamples from labelled st…
View article: PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention
PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention Open
We present PATHoBot an autonomous crop surveying and intervention robot for glasshouse environments. The aim of this platform is to autonomously gather high quality data and also estimate key phenotypic parameters. To achieve this we retro…
View article: A Sweet Pepper Harvesting Robot for Protected Cropping Environments
A Sweet Pepper Harvesting Robot for Protected Cropping Environments Open
Using robots to harvest sweet peppers in protected cropping environments has remained unsolved despite considerable effort by the research community over several decades. In this paper, we present the robotic harvester, Harvey, designed fo…
View article: 3D Move to See: Multi-perspective visual servoing for improving object views with semantic segmentation
3D Move to See: Multi-perspective visual servoing for improving object views with semantic segmentation Open
In this paper, we present a new approach to visual servoing for robotics, referred to as 3D Move to See (3DMTS), based on the principle of finding the next best view using a 3D camera array and a robotic manipulator to obtain multiple samp…
View article: Automating analysis of vegetation with computer vision: Cover estimates and classification
Automating analysis of vegetation with computer vision: Cover estimates and classification Open
This study develops an approach to automating the process of vegetation cover estimates using computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms. Visual cover estimation is a key tool for many ecological studies, yet quadrat‐based analyses…
View article: Fruit Quantity and Quality Estimation using a Robotic Vision System
Fruit Quantity and Quality Estimation using a Robotic Vision System Open
Accurate localisation of crop remains highly challenging in unstructured environments such as farms. Many of the developed systems still rely on the use of hand selected features for crop identification and often neglect the estimation of …
View article: Robotic Weeding – From Concept To Trials
Robotic Weeding – From Concept To Trials Open
This paper reports on the use of robotic selective mechanical cultivation as an alternative method to herbicide control for managing weed species in zero-till cropping systems. Existing best-practice technology in weed spot spraying utilis…
View article: In-Field Peduncle Detection of Sweet Peppers for Robotic Harvesting: a comparative study
In-Field Peduncle Detection of Sweet Peppers for Robotic Harvesting: a comparative study Open
Robotic harvesting of crops has the potential to disrupt current agricultural practices. A key element to enabling robotic harvesting is to safely remove the crop from the plant which often involves locating and cutting the peduncle, the p…
View article: Lessons Learnt from Field Trials of a Robotic Sweet Pepper Harvester
Lessons Learnt from Field Trials of a Robotic Sweet Pepper Harvester Open
In this paper, we present the lessons learnt during the development of a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper (capsicum) in protected cropping environments. Robotic harvesting offers an attractive poten…
View article: Towards Unsupervised Weed Scouting for Agricultural Robotics
Towards Unsupervised Weed Scouting for Agricultural Robotics Open
Weed scouting is an important part of modern integrated weed management but can be time consuming and sparse when performed manually. Automated weed scouting and weed destruction has typically been performed using classification systems ab…
View article: Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems
Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems Open
In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can\nautonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our\napproach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design\nto enable succ…