The TrimBot2020 gardening robot
Date: 4/6/23
Speaker: Professor Robert B. Fisher
Location: 122 Gates Hall or Zoom
Time: 2:40 p.m.-3:30 p.m.
Abstract: The TrimBot2020 gardening robot 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. Prof. Fisher will also present some work on aerial classification of forests needing thinning (or not).
Bio: 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, focusing 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. 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 reefsand 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).