PRG Seminar Series

on

Robotics and Computer Vision


A Talk on

The TrimBot gardening robot

Monday, April 10, 2023

Time: 2:00 PM

Room IRB 4105


by

Robert B. Fisher

Professor

University of Edinburgh



ABSTRACT

Prof. Robert B. Fisher will discuss the TrimBot gardening robot, which was developed as a prototype in the EC-funded TrimBot2020 research project. The device was designed as a mobile, largely autonomous robot for pruning bushes and rose plants. As an outdoor robot, it had to deal with changing lighting, targets moving in the wind, navigation problems, and natural plants with limited shape models. But the robot could successfully prune. This talk will overview the technologies enabling the robot. If there is time, Prof. Fisher will also present some work on aerial classification of forests needing thinning (or not).



ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Prof. Robert B. Fisher FIAPR, FBMVA received a BS (Mathematics, California Institute of Technology, 1974), MS (Computer Science, Stanford, 1978) and a PhD (Edinburgh, 1987). Since then, Bob has been an academic at Edinburgh University, including being College Dean of Research. He has been the Education Committee and Industrial Liaison Committee chairs for the Int. Association for Pattern Recognition, of which he is currently the association Treasurer. His research covers topics mainly in high level computer vision and 3D and 3D video analysis, focussing on reconstructing geometric models from existing examples, which contributed to a spin-off company, Dimensional Imaging. The research has led to 5 authored books and 300+ peer-reviewed scientific articles or book chapters (Google H-index: 53). He has developed several on-line computer vision resources, with over 1 million hits. Most recently, he has been the coordinator of EC projects 1) acquiring and analysing video data of 1.4 billion fish from over about 20 camera-years of undersea video of tropical coral reefs and 2) developing a gardening robot (hedge-trimming and rose pruning). He is a Fellow of the Int. Association for Pattern Recognition (2008) and the British Machine Vision Association (2010).





                 

  info[at]prg.cs.umd.edu