Abstract
To assist plant scientists, geneticists, and growers to understand
crop-environment interactions, plant phenotyping is a powerful tool for
improving crop cultivars and developing decision support systems in farm
management. Recent trends use LiDAR to capture three-dimensional (3D)
information from plants to analyze traits vital to plant growth and
development. However, current terrestrial-based 3D analysis
methodologies are time and labor intensive and can be a bottleneck when
large agricultural fields need to be analyzed. Robotic technologies can
be used to accelerate the field-based measurements of relevant plant
features and optimize the high-throughput phenotyping process. In this
paper, we present a robotic system with a 3D LiDAR and a data processing
pipeline for efficient, high-throughput field phenotyping of cotton
crops. The robotic system consists of a Husky robotic platform equipped
with a FARO Focus 3D laser scanner. The components of the system are
integrated under the ROS framework to ensure interoperability and data
integrity and availability at any given time. The data processing
pipeline involves the data collection, registration, and analysis tasks
for measuring crop traits at the plot level—canopy height, volume, and
light interception—and estimating yield. This work demonstrates a crop
phenotyping platform that leverages two off-the-shelf equipment for the
quantitative assessment of cotton plant traits in the field. This
methodology can be extended to other agricultural crops contributing to
the advancement of plant phenomics.