ISHS Acta Horticulturae 440: International Symposium on Plant Production in Closed Ecosystems
VISUAL SENSING ALGORITHM FOR CHRYSANTHEMUM CUTTING STICKING ROBOT SYSTEM |
| Authors: | N. Kondo, Y. Ogawa, M. Monta, Y. Shibano |
| Keywords: | chrysanthemum, cutting, machine vision, robot, sticking |
| Abstract:
The procedure to produce chrysanthemum seedling involves; making cuttings from mother plants of chrysanthemum, preserving the cuttings in a refrigerator to get appropriate amount of cuttings for planting at a time and sticking them into a plug tray after applying water on them over night. A commercialized transplanter had already been developed and was used for transplanting the chrysanthemum seedlings in the field. In the last procedure, a few lower leaves of cutting should be removed when plug tray seedlings are made for the transplanter, since the lower leaves would be obstacles for smooth transplanting. The procedure is still done manually, so early developments of machine systems are desired. A robotic chrysanthemum cutting sticking system introduced in this paper mainly consisted of a leaf removing device, a sticking device and a visual sensor. The visual sensor has to understand direction, location, size and shape of chrysanthemum cutting extracting features from acquired image in the robotic cutting sticking system. A color TV camera and a monochrome TV camera were used to discriminate target object from background. Comparing the thresholding images, monochrome TV camera including infrared sensitivity was effective in discriminating the cutting, because chrysanthemum cutting has much higher reflectance in infrared region than in visible region. After thresholding, border between object and background was represented by chain codes using eight values in image. The difference of chain code could indicate location of stem and its end of cutting. A manipulator could grip the cutting at an appropriate point and the cutting was transported to sticking device through leaf removing device. | |
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