Exploration of Autonomous Mobile Robots through Challenging Outdoor Environments for Natural Plant Recognition Using Deep Neural Network

Modernization of living environments and human activities have severe effects on many parameters and factors such as climate change and global warming, an increase of incidence and the severity of wildfires, land surfaces and ice sheets, ecological imbalance, change of fertility of the soil, flow of energy, food security, etc. In addition, human modernization has had a negative impact on biodiversity and the natural environment. An integral component of modernization is agriculture that associates with the outdoor environment and relevant issues. Automation of agricultural activities contributes to reducing the dependency on human labor and the harmful effects on the natural environment. The correct identification of plants in outdoor environments has been neglected and many critical environmental and non-environmental limits and factors, such as weather conditions, time, viewpoint, lighting conditions (illuminations and light intensity), distance, etc., have not been considered in existing plant recognition systems and technologies. Hence, there is a demand to develop mobile and real-time systems for plant recognition in natural environments. This paper addresses these challenges and introduces the application of autonomous mobile robot and semi-robots for recognition of natural plant species in outdoor environments. Furthermore, the proposed system presents the use of employing low-cost cameras, such as iPhone 6s, Canon EOS 600D and Samsung Galaxy Note 4, for plant recognition system in real-time. The performance of the system has been tested with a number of experiments in different years, 2017 and 2018, and at different times of day, morning and evening. The proposed system is a combination of new technologies involving deep learning concepts and an autonomous field robot to carry out precise plant recognition in challenging environments. The final accuracy of the mobile real-time system is 84.1666%.