|
|
 |
Robotic Manipulation of Small Plants (ARC project) |
James Trevelyan Updated December 2004
This was a collaborative project with the School of Biological and Environmental Sciences at Murdoch University to develop robots for handling and dissecting minute plant cuttings to automate tissue culture for plant production. This is a technique which could be used for producing specialized new plant varieties for reclaiming salt affected land, improved tree varieties, and food producing and medicinal plants. Most of the research work was on machine vision techniques. We focused our research on snakes because this offers a method of visually programming feature recognition and location techniques. June 1995 saw a major breakthrough in snakes techniques, and we are heading towards a highly reliable means of dealing with stem type plant cuttings.
This technology could one day help to produce plants for regenerating huge areas of land by cheaply reproducing specially selected plant varieties using robots. It is at the leading edge of robotics applications which have to deal with biological variations. The work has not been progressed further since 1996.
 |
SnakesUsing snakes to measure plants, sheep and other animals: an innovation in computer vision.James Trevelyan
|
Keywords:active contour model, snakes, flexible template model, spatial filter model
Tried and true methods in computer vision turned out to be quite inadequate when applied to the problem of measuring sheep before they are shorn by a robot.Variations in sheep shape, dirt and stains in the wool, and the texture of thefleece all caused difficult problems. A "snake" is a relatively new technique in computer vision but provides a very reliable answer to these problems. Snakes can be useful for measuring all kindsof objects using computer vision. They provide fast results under varying visual conditions which cause other methods to fail.
A research project at the Department of Mechanical Engineering aims to further develop these techniques to enable robots to handle small plants. There is great potential to reduce the costs of plant propagation (see above) if robotic techniques can be applied.
We have software available which we will provide to research and educational users. There are two principal versions. The original version runs in DOS (it prefers 32 bit extended DOS), or UNIX, using identical code which relies on the Little-X graphical user interface toolkit. The more recent version,using the same underying snakes algorithm, has been set up with a Visual Basic graphical user interface. This runs in Windows 95 or Windows NT. This version is currently on restricted release which means we ask you to request permission to download it.
To see what each version looks like, try the respective tutorials:
Download the following items:
snakes.tar.Z (1.5 MBytes)
You should uncompress this, and then use tar to create 3 directories:
You may need to modify the makefiles slightly - consult an experienced C programmer for your flavour of Unix.
Also, download some reports which may be helpful:
A (dated) application note which explains how to set up snakes software. (Contrary to what this note says, the source files have been converted so any C compiler will compile them.)
A more recent report (which accompanies the Win-95/NT version).
You may also need a DOS conversion utility (gif2vip.exe) which translates GIF images to our internal VIP image format.
Download the following items:
s1.zip (0.2 Mbytes) - programs
s2.zip (1.0 Mbytes) - smaple images
s3.zip (0.2 Mbytes) - source code
lx.zip (0.8 Mbytes) - Little-X graphics
readme-x - Read Me file for Little-X (manuals)
install.bat - Batch file which comes with the diskette version - will indicate what you need to do to the above files.
You should unzip these. Make sure you read the "readme" file for instructions on what to do next.
Also, download some reports which may be helpful:
A (dated) application note which explains how to set up snakes software. (Contrary to what this note says, the source files have been converted so any C compiler will compile them.)
A more recent report (which accompanies the Win-95/NT version).
You may also need a DOS conversion utility (gif2vip.exe) which translates GIF images to our internal VIP image format.
Download the single zip file:
snakes-95-NT.zip (3.9 MBytes, E-mail: - please tell us what you plan to use the code for)
Unzip this file, and run "setup.exe" which installs the programs on your system. It comes with an uninstall utility as well. This version will read GIF images as well as our internal VIP image format.
Also, download a useful report.
|James Trevelyan's Page | School
of Mechanical Engineering| UWA Home Page|