Carrot and Beetroot our vineyard scanning robots

Introducing our robots, Beetroot and Carrot! They can be recognised by their different coloured covers, plus different scanning bars. Beetroot has the purple cover and carrot of course is orange! The covers are to shield the industrial PCs from dust/rain. Our staff member Richie, vacuum formed them out of PETG plastic in the University of Canterbury Mechanical Engineering Department. The cases remain on during scanning.

We have been scanning the same rows at Waipara, to test Carrot out before orchard testing. Beetroot has two columns of 6 cameras, each column tilted inwards to hopefully have more poses targeting occluded objects, especially on grapevines. Carrot has a single long bar specifically for the tall, planar trees in orchards. They both have the same cameras, there’s just more separation between the Carrot cams and they’re positioned and posed linearly.

We took both robots out as we were testing some changes to the navigation system on Beetroot (plus just a general scan of the vineyard for data), and doing the first in-field test of Carrot. 

Carrot, our latest platform, has a 2.2m long camera bar meaning we can capture data of taller crops such as the modern growing systems used for apples, cherries, peaches, and plums, as well as grape vines.

Apart from the camera bars and their support structures we are trying to keep all rovers standardised, so we can easily maintain them.

We have set rows that we typically track the progress of so we only scan approximately 4 rows per trip. However in future, we may have two rovers scanning at once if we scale up our operation to scan whole vineyards at speed!