BonnBot-I Plus: A Bio-Diversity Aware Precise Weed Management Robotic Platform
Alireza Ahmadi, Michael Halstead, Claus Smitt, Chris McCool
Abstract
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 BonnBot-I. This article presents the recent advancements in weed management algorithms and the real-world performance of BonnBot-I at the University of Bonn's Klein-Altendorf campus. We present a novel Rolling-view observation model for the BonnBot-Is weed monitoring section which leads to an average absolute weeding performance enhancement of 3.4%. Furthermore, for the first time, we show how precision weeding robots could consider bio-diversity-aware concerns in challenging weeding scenarios. We carried out comprehensive weeding experiments in sugar-beet fields, covering both weed-only and mixed crop-weed situations, and introduced a new dataset compatible with precision weeding. Our real-field experiments revealed that our weeding approach is capable of handling diverse weed distributions, with a minimal loss of only 11.66% attributable to intervention planning and 14.7% to vision system limitations highlighting required improvements of the vision system.