Automated Boxwood Topiary Trimming with a Robotic Arm and Integrated Stereo Vision

This paper presents an integrated hardware-software solution to perform fully automated robotic bush trimming to user-specified shapes. In contrast to specialized solutions that can trim only bushes of a certain shape, the approach ensures flexibility via a vision-based shape fitting module that allows fitting an arbitrary mesh into a bush at hand. A trimming planning method considers the available degrees of freedom of the robot arm to achieve effective cutting motions. The performance of the mesh fitting module is assessed in multiple experiments involving both artificial and real plants with a variety of shapes. The trimming accuracy of the overall approach is quantitatively evaluated by inspecting the bush pointcloud before and after robotic trimming, and measuring the change in the deviation from the originally computed target mesh.