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Conventional farming still relies on large quantities of agrochemicals for weed management which have several negative side‐effects on the environment. Autonomous robots offer the potential to reduce the amount of chemicals applied, as robots can monitor and treat each plant in the field individually and thereby circumventing the uniform chemical treatment of the whole field. Such agricultural robots need the ability to identify individual crops and weeds in the field using sensor data and must additionally select effective treatment methods based on the type of weed. For example, certain types of weeds can only be effectively treated mechanically due to their resistance to herbicides, whereas other types can be treated trough selective spraying. In this article, we present a novel system that provides the necessary information for effective plant‐specific treatment. It estimates the stem location for weeds, which enables the robots to perform precise mechanical treatment, and at the same time provides the pixel‐accurate area covered by weeds for treatment through selective spraying. The major challenge in developing such a system is the large variability in the visual appearance that occurs in different fields. Thus, an effective classification system has to robustly handle substantial environmental changes including varying weed pressure, various weed types, different growth stages, changing visual appearance of the plants and the soil. Our approach uses an end‐to‐end trainable fully convolutional network that simultaneously estimates plant stem positions as well as the spatial extent of crop plants and weeds. It jointly learns how to detect the stems and the pixel‐wise semantic segmentation and incorporates spatial information by considering image sequences of local field strips. The jointly learned feature representation for both tasks furthermore exploits the crop arrangement information that is often present in crop fields. This information is considered even if it is only observable from the image sequences and not a single image. Such image sequences, as typically provided by robots navigating over the field along crop rows, enable our approach to robustly estimate the semantic segmentation and stem positions despite the large variations encountered in different fields. We implemented and thoroughly tested our approach on images from multiple farms in different countries. The experiments show that our system generalizes well to previously unseen fields under varying environmental conditions—a key capability to deploy such systems in the real world. Compared to state‐of‐the‐art approaches, our approach generalizes well to unseen fields and not only substantially improves the stem detection accuracy, that is, distinguishing crop and weed stems, but also improves the semantic segmentation performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of robots in precision farming has the potential to reduce the reliance on herbicides and pesticides through selectively spraying individual plants or through manual weed removal. A prerequisite for that is the ability of the robot to separate and identify the value crops and the weeds in the field. Based on the output of the robot's perception system, it can trigger the actuators for spraying or removal. In this paper, we address the problem of detecting sugar beet plants as well as weeds using a camera installed on a mobile field robot. We propose a system that performs vegetation detection, local as well as object-based feature extraction, random forest classification, and smoothing through a Markov random field to obtain an accurate estimate of crops and weeds. We implemented and thoroughly evaluated our system using a real farm robot in different sugar beet fields, and we illustrate that our approach allows for accurately identifying weeds in a field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past, there has been a tremendous amount of progress in the area of autonomous robot navigation, and a large variety of robots have been developed that demonstrated robust navigation capabilities indoors, in nonurban outdoor environments, or on roads; relatively few approaches have focused on navigation in urban environments such as city centers. Urban areas, however, introduce numerous challenges for autonomous robots as they are rather unstructured and dynamic. In this paper, we present a navigation system for mobile robots designed to operate in crowded city environments and pedestrian zones. We describe the different components of this system, including a simultaneous localization and mapping module for dealing with huge maps of city centers, a planning component for inferring feasible paths, taking into account the traversability and type of terrain, a module for accurate localization in dynamic environments, and the means for calibrating and monitoring the platform. Our navigation system has been implemented and tested in several large-scale field tests, in which a real robot autonomously navigated over several kilometers in a complex urban environment. This also included a public demonstration, during which the robot autonomously traveled along a more than 3-km-long route through the city center of Freiburg, Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the third special issue on agricultural robots in the I Journal of Field Robotics i . Bosilj et al. and Lottes et al. explore aspects of the deployment capability of weed and crop segmentation algorithms for weed management. This includes the ground truth physical characteristics of the crop, environmental data, soil sensor information as well as stereo color, thermal and hyperspectral imagery. [Extracted from the article]