Real-Time Detection of Vine Trunk for Robot Localization Using Deep Learning Models Developed for Edge TPU Devices

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture is associated with the use of high-tech devices such as robots and sensors that are interconnected to assess or monitor conditions on a particular plot of land and then deploy the various factors of production such as seeds, fertilizer, water, etc., accordingly. Vine trunk detection can help create an accurate map of the vineyard that the agricultural robot can rely on to safely navigate and perform a variety of agricultural tasks such as harvesting, pruning, etc. In this work, the state-of-the-art single-shot multibox detector (SSD) with MobileDet Edge TPU and MobileNet Edge TPU models as the backbone was used to detect the tree trunks in the vineyard. Compared to the SSD with MobileNet-V1, MobileNet-V2, and MobileDet as backbone, the SSD with MobileNet Edge TPU was more accurate in inference on the Raspberrypi, with almost the same inference time on the TPU. The SSD with MobileDet Edge TPU achieved the second-best accurate model. Additionally, this work examines the effects of some features, including the size of the input model, the quantity of training data, and the diversity of the training dataset. Increasing the size of the input model and the training dataset increased the performance of the model.