Developing Non-Destructive Inspection Motion Primitives for Robotic Plant Interaction

Develop and validate robot motion primitives for non-destructive plant inspection that enable gentle and precise manipulation of delicate plant structures such as leaves during robotic interaction.

Background

The paper presents Botany-Bot, which builds 3D digital twins of plants and uses a robot arm to manipulate leaves for high-resolution inspection of occluded features. While many agricultural robotics applications focus on destructive tasks like harvesting or weeding, inspection requires delicate, precise, and safe motions.

Within the survey of prior work, the authors explicitly identify the absence of robust non-destructive inspection primitives as an open challenge in robotic plant interaction, motivating research on motion primitives that can gently manipulate leaves without damage while enabling effective inspection.