Abstract

The TrimBot gardening robot was developed as a prototype in the EC-funded TrimBot2020 research project. It 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 work on the aerial classification of forests needing thinning.

About Bob Fisher

Professor Robert B. Fisher is the Chair in Computer Vision at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. He received a B.S. with Honors (Mathematics) from the California Institute of Technology (1974) and a M.S. (Computer Science) from Stanford University (1978). He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh (1987), investigating computer vision. Since then, Bob has been an academic at Edinburgh University, now in the School of Informatics, where helped found the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour. His research covers topics in high-level and 3D computer vision, focussing on reconstructing geometric models from existing examples (of industrial parts, buildings and people – the latter work has contributed to a spin-off company, Dimensional Imaging, in conjunction with Glasgow University). More recently, he has also been researching video sequence understanding, in particular attempting to understand observed behavior. He also has a passion for online teaching and research resources for the computer vision community, leading to several well-used text and interactive exploration resources. He has published or edited 9 books and about 260 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including 43 journal papers. He has been the principal investigator on about 5 million pounds of research funding, primarily from EPSRC and the EC. Most recently, he has become joint PI on a Wellcome Foundation grant (350K pounds) to investigate 3D aspects of skin cancer, a co-investigator on a bat acoustic robotics project, which is using a novel 500 fps range sensor (340K pounds) and the coordinator of a project acquiring and analyzing video data of fish over about 20 camera-years. Currently, he is also the Dean of Research at the College of Science and Engineering. He is a Fellow of the Int. Association for Pattern Recognition (2008) and the British Machine Vision Association (2010).

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