The first tests with our new AgileX Hunter 2.0 robots have been conducted in CEFEL orchards located near Montauban, close to Toulouse. The goal of the campaign was to test the onboard sensors and start building an image database thanks to the four embedded cameras. The robot was remotely controlled to navigate through the orchard, sequencing several rows following and U-turns. Several rosbags were recorded and will be processed soon to evaluate the performances of our tree detection algorithm. This algorithm [1] consists of finding the trunks by detecting their shadows which are materialized by concavities in the point cloud obtained from the cameras. More details can be found in this article here.
[1] Tree detection with low-cost 3D sensors for autonomous navigation in orchards. A. Durand-Petiteville, E. Le Flecher, V. Cadenat, T. Sentenac, S. Vougioukas. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL), Vol.3, N°4, pp. 3876-3883, October 2018.
