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This paper introduces STEMbot, a miniature climbing robot designed for autonomous navigation under plant canopies to facilitate early pest detection in organic agriculture. By integrating a geometric PIN-SLAM pipeline with a semantic OcTree, STEMbot achieves robust localization and mapping while traversing plant stems, which are typically challenging for existing monitoring systems. Experimental validation demonstrates its capability to navigate stems of varying sizes and achieve high-fidelity geometric reconstructions, confirming its effectiveness in agricultural monitoring tasks.
STEMbot can autonomously navigate under plant canopies, achieving high-fidelity pest detection where traditional methods fail.
The scalability of organic agriculture is partially limited by the labor costs associated with monitoring for pests. While drones and rovers are well-suited for agricultural monitoring from above or next to plants, many pests live on the underside of leaves or on plant stems, making them detectable only after they have caused significant damage. To enable early pest detection we present STEMbot, a miniature climbing robot system designed for autonomous navigation under plant canopies. Unlike existing climbing platforms that lack on-board perception or are restricted to unbranched vertical trunks, STEMbot integrates a fully geometric PIN-SLAM pipeline with a semantic OcTree to achieve robust localization and mapping while climbing the plant. To plan STEMbot's motion we propose a manifold-constrained A* planner along with ray-tracing goal specification to enable branch-aware traversal and the inspection of occluded targets. We validate our system through hardware experiments, demonstrating reliable traversal of stems ranging from 7-33mm and autonomous navigation across four distinct plant specimens. Quantitative evaluations show that our system achieves high-fidelity geometric reconstructions with an average Chamfer distance of less than 1cm relative to an offline photogrammetry baseline, confirming that STEMbot maintains the globally consistent odometry needed for autonomous navigation.
