Efficient and thorough vineyard inspection is crucial for optimizing yield and preventing disease from spreading. Manual approaches are labor-intensive and prone to human error, motivating the development of automated solutions. Precision viticulture benefits greatly from access to photo-realistic 3D vineyard maps and from capturing intricate visual details necessary for accurate canopy and grape health assessment. Generating such maps efficiently proves challenging, particularly when employing cost-effective equipment. This paper presents a novel vineyard inspection and 3D reconstruction framework implemented on a Robotic Platform (RP) equipped with three stereo cameras. The framework’s performance was evaluated on an experimental synthetic vineyard developed at NTUA. This testing setup allowed experimentation under diverse lighting conditions, ensuring the system’s robustness under realistic scenarios. Unlike existing solutions, which often focus on specific aspects of the inspection, our framework offers a top-down approach, encompassing autonomous navigation, high-fidelity 3D reconstruction, and canopy growth assessment. The developed software is available at the Control Systems Laboratory’s (CSL) bitbucket repository [1].

Analytical expressions are derived for actuator demands in quadrupedal locomotion of constant speed and height by using a reduction from a trot/ pace 6-bar model to a single-legged model and employing two widely used two-segmented leg architectures, the serial and the parallel. A method is developed that outputs optimal gait characteristics and leg designs for a robot to move with maximum efficiency or speed. Also, generic guidelines are presented, which answer questions such as: which speed should be selected for maximum efficiency, or which is the optimal leg architecture (serial/ parallel) and leg length for maximum efficiency or speed.

Quadrupedal trotting gaits of constant forward velocity and body height are studied. A method is developed, which is structured upon analytical expressions derived from the dynamics of a reduced single-legged model comprised of a point mass, and two actuated rotational joints. The inputs of the method include the robot mass, the leg and actuator properties, and the desired forward velocity, yielding all robot body feasible trajectories and their energy footprints. Thus, the method predicts the maximum forward velocity of a trotting quadruped; it also suggests energetically optimal combinations of body height and step length for a given forward velocity.

This paper introduces a leg design method aiming at speed maximization for quadruped robots with two-segment compliant legs, in trotting and bounding. The proposed method is an effort to address the leg design challenge in a holistic way, exploiting the coupling between gait parameters, leg design parameters and hardware constraints, while remaining control scheme independent. Optimal body trajectories and footfalls are derived using a simplified centroidal dynamics model, whereas joint trajectories and torques are computed by a more complex dynamic model, incorporating actuation parameters and constraints. The method is applied using real robot parameters to yield an optimal leg design, validated through a realistic trotting simulation experiment. In this experiment, the robot achieves accelerating motion from stance towards the maximum speed predicted by the method.

While legged locomotion is a rapidly advancing area in robotics, several issues regarding the performance of such robots on deformable ground are still open. In this paper, we generate a pronking gait on a quadruped robot using a controller, which takes into account the effects of ground deformation. The controller, initially developed for monopods, is modified appropriately to operate for quadrupeds. The robot uses a reaction wheel to retain a desired body pitch. The dynamic models of leg motor drivetrains and of the reaction wheel are incorporated and their importance in the design of legged robots is highlighted. Simulation results show good performance in reaching commanded apex heights and forward velocities when traversing various deformable terrains, demonstrating that the developed controller is quite promising.