Archie Jnr: A Robotic Platform for Autonomous Cane Pruning of Grapevines
Henry Williams, David Anthony James Smith, Jalil Shahabi, Trevor Gee, Ans Qureshi, Benjamin John McGuinness, Scott Harvey, Catherine Downes, Rahul Jangali, Kale Black, Shen Hin Lim, Mike Duke, Bruce MacDonald
Abstract
Cane pruning grapevines is a complex manual task requiring expert vine assessment to determine which canes to prune. This paper presents Archie Jnr, which was developed to autonomously assess the structure of the vine and prune the lower-quality canes as an expert pruner would. The platform has been extensively evaluated in a real-world commercial vineyard using a three-cane pruning method. The results show the effectiveness of the vision system for generating accurate assessments of a vine’s canes. The platform is also shown to be capable of successfully pruning 71.1% of the 311 total canes that required pruning across 25 vines.