Image-guided robotics for the automation of micropropagation

Describes a robots workstation used as a test bed for evaluating tools and techniques for automating the technique of micropropagation. A number of novel plant manipulation tools have been developed. These tools are mounted on a Cartesian geometry robot driven by stepper motors to perform the required harvesting, cutting and planting movements. Overall robot direction is provided by a program which is updated according to the shape, position and orientation of a particular microplant. Information from a video camera can either be displayed on a monitor and assessed by an operator, or can be analysed by a vision processing system. This paper describes the robot workstation and discusses the various vision analysis tasks necessary for automatic robot guidance.<
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