arXiv Computer Vision

ALFRED: Requirement-driven development of an open-source mobile manipulator for long-term plant monitoring

ALFRED is an open‑source mobile manipulator designed for long‑term plant monitoring, built from commercial parts and featuring a six‑degree‑of‑freedom arm, LiDAR, RGB‑D cameras, RTK GNSS, and an IMU on an Ackermann‑steered base. The platform was iteratively refined over four builds to meet six requirements—durability, modularity, repairability, sensing reach, endurance, and reproducibility—resulting in a 66.1% usable arm reach and clear LiDAR views in the final build. Over a year of monthly forest surveys, ALFRED completed 528 traversals without missing a scheduled collection, demonstrating its reliability despite battery wear and rapid build transitions.

arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 14

RoMu4o: A Robotic Manipulation Unit For Orchard Operations Automating Proximal Hyperspectral Leaf Sensing

RoMu4o is a ground robot equipped with a 6‑DOF arm and a vision system that performs real‑time deep‑learning image processing and motion planning for proximal hyperspectral leaf sensing in orchards. The system uses robust perception and manipulation pipelines to identify leaf 3D structure, propose 6‑D poses, and generate collision‑free, constraint‑aware paths for precise leaf grasping and spectroscopy. In lab trials the robot achieved a 95 % success rate for 1‑LPB hyperspectral sampling, while field trials in a pistachio orchard reached 70 % success for autonomous leaf grasping and measurement. whyItMatters":"The system demonstrates a viable robotic solution to automate leaf‑level hyperspectral sensing, addressing labor shortages and enabling precise crop health monitoring in precision agriculture."

By Mehrad Mortazavi, David J. Cappelleri, Reza Ehsani
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Robostral Navigate

arXiv:2607. 20785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently.

By Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
arXiv AI
Jun 2

PEACE: A Planner-Executor Agent with Constraint Enforcement for UAVs

arXiv:2606. 00104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly used to drive autonomous systems, yet existing approaches either keep the model in a tight control loop, raising latency and hallucination risk, or compile natural language into opaque end-to-end policies that are hard to explain, constraint and require domain-specific datasets and fine-tuning.

By Erdem Uysal, Timo Kehrer, Sebastiano Panichella
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 10

UAV3DCrop: Benchmarking 3D Reconstruction in Repeated Multi-Angle UAV Crop Surveys

arXiv:2608. 06404v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate 3D crop monitoring underpins data-driven precision agriculture by enabling field-scale analysis of plant structure, growth dynamics, and management response.

By Junxiong Zhou, Xuechen Li, Chonghao Qiu, Lang Qiao, Xiaowei Jia, Qi Yang, Chishan Zhang, Leikun Yin, Nanshan You, Vipin Kumar, David Mulla, Ce Yang, Zhenong Jin, Licheng Liu
arXiv AI
5d ago

Make Code as Policy Great Again: Frontier Agents Write, Call, and Evolve Robot Tools

The paper introduces URAI, a Universal Robot‑Agent Interface that separates robot control into two roles: a programming agent that writes reusable, task‑specific tools from intent, and an execution agent that calls these tools in a feedback loop. This design keeps high‑level decision making in the model while delegating low‑level motion to code, allowing tool revisions to persist across episodes without retraining the foundation model. Experiments on RoboDojo and AgileX tasks show significant gains in success rate, speed, and token efficiency compared to direct fingertip control and pre‑written programs.

By Shijia Ge, Alex Zhou, Jianshu Zeng, Yexing Wan, Di Wu, Zelin Zheng, Yazhe Wang, Zhiqi Jia, Xuan Shangguan, Jay Zhu, Yijun Liu, Lingyu He, Sihang Wu, Xiao He, Hongcheng Gao
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 21

Optimizing YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for Fine-Grained Small-Object Detection and Segmentation in Complex Orchard Environments

The paper compares Ultralytics YOLO27, YOLO26, YOLO11, and YOLOv8 for detecting and segmenting small fruit parts in orchard settings. It evaluates five model scales across 30 experiments, finding that YOLO11s-960 and YOLO26s-960 achieve the best mask and box mAP scores while maintaining efficient parameter counts. The study also highlights the difficulty of peduncle detection and provides publicly available code and models for reproducibility.

By Ranjan Sapkota, Manoj Karkee