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The next milestone was to fully automate the BB so the system could become more efficient, reliable and require less labor. As we were planning for these BB improvements, a very ambitious project was starting to brew within our research group: , a Weeds Image Repository for the United States for which the BB has now become a fundamental tool.
This new project required the BB to be able to perform in a semi-field setup so we started working on a design that could accommodate that. By the spring of 2021 we had a fully automated system. With the addition of motorized wheels, an object avoidance system and a custom UI, the BB was able to move fully on its own from pot to pot and from row to row while keeping track of the collected data. We were able to brig the data collection time down to a fraction of what it took with the BB v1.
With the semi-field setup that you see in the video, BB was able to collect 180 high resolution images/hour, taking ~2.5 h to scan this full setup of 450 pots.
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BenchBot v3
Coming in 2023
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