The Robotanist: A ground-based agricultural robot for high-throughput crop phenotyping

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The established processes for measuring physiological and morphological traits (phenotypes) of crops in outdoor test plots are labor intensive and error-prone. Low-cost, reliable, field-based robotic phenotyping will enable geneticists to more easily map genotypes to phenotypes, which in turn will improve crop yields. In this paper, we present a novel robotic ground-based platform capable of autonomously navigating below the canopy of row crops such as sorghum or corn. The robot is also capable of deploying a manipulator to measure plant stalk strength and gathering phenotypic data with a modular array of non-contact sensors. We present data obtained from deployments to Sorghum bicolor test plots at various sites in South Carolina, USA.