In this page we briefly describe what the BenchBot is, its beginnings, why we decided to embark in this project, its main components and uses, and we also present some of the reasons why we think this is such a revolutionary and unique tool for precision agriculture.
What is BenchBot?
BenchBot is a high-throughput robotic platform which can collect data in a systematic, fast and reliable manner.
How everything started
In the year 2018 we were running a breeding project in one of the greenhouses at BARC which required measuring the height of 960 plants growing in pots weekly. This task required 2 people doing this activity for a full day. We were also collecting overhead images of the plants using a pvc frame and a commercial small digital camera which also took a full day and two people to accomplish every week.
Example images of crimson clover at (1) week 8, (2) week 11, (3) week 14 and (4) week 17.
The time that this took and the quality of the images that we were getting made us realize that we needed a better system. And that is why the BB was created.
BenchBot v1
The first version of the BB was design to collect images in a semi-automated way since the plate to which we mounted the camera moved on its own but we had to manually move the platform from one row of pots to the next. This drastically improved the efficiency of data collection and the quality of the images that we were getting for the second year of the experiment (2019). We were able to cut the data collection time in half and we were getting images of individual pots instead of several pots per image.
Example images from crimson clover at week 6 (1), week 8 (2), week 10 (3) and week 12 (4).
For this project we used the intel RealSense d-435i camera which collects RGB and depth data from which biomass could be estimated.
BenchBot v2
The next milestone was to fully automate the BB so the system could become more efficient, reliable and require less labor.
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