Robotic Perception in Agri-food Manipulation: A Review

Abstract: To better optimise the global food supply chain, robotic solutions are needed to automate tasks currently completed by humans. Namely, phenotyping, quality analysis and harvesting are all open problems in the field of agricultural robotics. Robotic perception is a key challenge for autonomous solutions to such problems as scene understanding and object detection are vital prerequisites to any grasping tasks that a robot may undertake. This work conducts a brief review of modern robot perception models and discusses their efficacy within the agri-food domain.