orchard managers

Abstract: Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive yet essential for maintaining modern high-productivity fruit orchards. In this work, we focus on pruning of modern planar tree training systems - V-Trellis apples and UFO cherries - where trunks and primary branches are trained into approximately planar walls. We introduce an end-to-end pipeline to learn a closed-loop visuomotor controller for robotic pruning. This controller is trained entirely using simulation and synthetically generated data and deployed in real orchards in a zero-shot manner. The pipeline comprises synthetic generation of planar orchard tree meshes, construction of a physics-based orchard simulator, automated collection of successful pruning trajectories via motion planning, and policy learning with a novel hybrid reinforcement-learning algorithm that combines offline demonstrations with online simulated rollouts. The controller uses optical-flow inputs from a wrist-mounted camera - avoiding the need for full 3D-reconstruction - and continuously guides the cutter through cluttered branch environments to a specified cutpoint with correct tool orientation. In exhaustive simulated task-space evaluations over 3,000 pruning points, the policy attains 49.9% success on V-Trellis apples and 46.0% on UFO cherries. We validate the learned controller across 38 physical trials - comprising 28 outdoor field trials in commercial and experimental orchards and 10 indoor laboratory tests - demonstrating zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. The learned policy also outperforms a classical RRT-Connect baseline on physical hardware in laboratory trials.

Abstract: Static-image benchmarks do not capture the computational and temporal requirements of practical orchard video analytics. This study presents an end-to-end framework for real-time fruit detection, tracking, and counting on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super. A lightweight YOLO26s detector is trained independently on four public datasets representing apples, mangoes, blueberries, and strawberries under a common protocol. The models are deployed on embedded platform using PyTorch and TensorRT at FP32, FP16, and INT8 precision. APPLE MOTS is then used for temporal video analytics because it provides orchard sequences with persistent fruit identities, enabling evaluation of multi-object tracking and unique-fruit counting. The selected FP16 TensorRT detector is integrated into an NVIDIA DeepStream pipeline combining hardware-accelerated decoding, ByteTrack tracking, and motion-aware line-crossing analytics. Across the four detection tasks, mean test mAP@50:95 ranges from 0.4957 to 0.8656. On the Jetson, TensorRT FP16 achieves 66.76-74.56 images/s at 13.41-14.98 ms prediction latency, while reducing mAP@50:95 by only 0.0020-0.0054 and gross energy consumption by approximately 64-66% relative to PyTorch FP32. The complete detector-tracker-analytics pipeline reaches 44.96-54.11 FPS and sustains the configured 30-FPS input rate without output-frame loss. On held-out orchard video sequences, HOTA ranges from 0.345 to 0.538, event-level counting F1 from 0.611 to 0.803, and relative count error from 6.2% to 51.6%. Performance varies across acquisition geometries: near-lateral row viewing yields the most stable tracking and counting, whereas forward traversal remains association- and recall-limited despite spatially adaptive counting geometry. These results show that practical edge-based fruit monitoring requires efficient detection and acquisition geometries that support reliable temporal association.