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].

In this paper, we study the effect of alternative leg designs on energy consumption in legged locomotion. Focusing on gaits with constant horizontal velocity and constant height we introduce models of two simplified parallel and serial designs with realistic mechanical and actuation parameters. The analysis yields the distribution of power demands in the leg workspace, leading to useful conclusions related to mechanical power antagonism and actuator electric losses. Mechanical antagonism occurs not only in parallel but also in serial legs causing extensive power waste, since one actuator contributes to the locomotion task and the other consumes power with no contribution to it. Based on the analysis, we propose a new leg design that minimizes the total actuation power consumption criterion given a nominal robot toe trajectory.

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.

This paper studies the effect of a flexible linear torso on the dynamics of passive quadruped bounding. A reduced-order passive and conservative model with translational spinal joint and springy legs is introduced. Numerical return map studies reveal the existence of a confined area of fixed points generating high-speed cyclic bounding motions by exploiting the natural dynamics of the model. The corresponding motion features extensive bidirectional spine deformation. The model displays interesting techniques that result in high-speed locomotion, such as increased flight phase duration and stride length. The obtained results show that the corresponding robot gaits and the associated performance resemble those of its natural counterparts even though the spinal joint lies beyond the bioinspired regime.