This study presents a methodology to safely manipulate branches to aid various agricultural tasks. Humans in a real agricultural environment often manipulate branches to perform agricultural tasks effectively, but current agricultural robots lack this capability. This proposed strategy to manipulate branches can aid in different precision agriculture tasks, such as fruit picking in dense foliage, pollinating flowers under occlusion, and moving overhanging vines and branches for navigation. The proposed method modifies RRT* to plan a path that satisfies the branch geometric constraints and obeys branch deformable characteristics. Re-planning is done to obtain a path that helps the robot exert force within a desired range so that branches are not damaged during manipulation. Experimentally, this method achieved a success rate of 78\% across 50 trials, successfully moving a branch from different starting points to a target region.

翻译：本研究提出了一种安全操控枝条以辅助多种农业作业的方法。在真实农业环境中，人类常通过操控枝条来有效执行农业任务，但现有农业机器人尚不具备此能力。所提出的枝条操控策略可辅助多种精准农业任务，例如茂密枝叶中的果实采摘、遮挡条件下的花朵授粉，以及为导航而移开悬垂藤蔓和枝条。该方法通过改进RRT*算法来规划满足枝条几何约束并遵循枝条可变形特性的路径。通过重新规划获得能使机器人在期望范围内施力的路径，从而避免操控过程中对枝条造成损伤。实验表明，该方法在50次试验中取得了78%的成功率，能够成功地将枝条从不同起始点移动至目标区域。