Path Planning Algorithms Benchmarking for Grapevines Pruning and Monitoring

Labour shortage is a reality in agriculture. Farmers are asking for solutions to automate agronomic tasks, such as monitoring, pruning, spraying, and harvesting. The automation of these tasks requires, most of the time, the use of robotic arms to mimic human arms capabilities. The current robotic arm based solutions available, both in the market and in the scientific sphere, have several limitations, such as, low-speed manipulation, the path planning algorithms are not aware of the requirements of the agricultural tasks (robotic motion and manipulation synchronisation), and require active perception tuning to the end-target point. This work benchmarks algorithms from open manipulation planning library (OMPL) considering a cost-effective six-degree freedom manipulator in a simulated vineyard. The OMPL planners shown a very low performance under demanding pruning tasks. The best and most promising results are performed and obtained by BiTRRT. However, further work is needed to increase its performance and reduce planning time. This benchmark work helps the reader to understand the limitations of each algorithm and when to use them.