High-Throughput Robotic Phenotyping of Energy Sorghum Crops

Plant phenotyping is a time consuming, labour intensive, error prone process of measuring the physical properties of plants. We present a scalable robotic system which employs computer vision and machine learning to phenotype plants rapidly. It maintains high throughput making multiple phenotyping measurements during the plant lifecycle in plots containing thousands of plants. Our novel approach allows scanning of plants inside the plant canopy in addition to the top and bottom section of the plants. Here we present our design decisions, implementation challenges and field observations.