Tootfinder

🥭 From orchard to fridge: Helping mangoes stay sweet for longer
#fruit

From orchard to fridge: Helping mangoes stay sweet for longer
In good news for mango lovers, new research from Edith Cowan University (ECU) has identified a way to extend the storage life of the popular tropical fruit.

Vision-based Navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Orchards: An Imitation Learning Approach
Peng Wei, Prabhash Ragbir, Stavros G. Vougioukas, Zhaodan Kong
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02617

Vision-based Navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Orchards: An Imitation Learning Approach
Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation in orchards presents significant challenges due to obstacles and GPS-deprived environments. In this work, we introduce a learning-based approach to achieve vision-based navigation of UAVs within orchard rows. Our method employs a variational autoencoder (VAE)-based controller, trained with an intervention-based learning framework that allows the UAV to learn a visuomotor policy from human experience. We validate our approach in real orchard en…

I maintain a heterogeneous MSP environment for backup which consists of a collection of sh scripts (they mostly run on FreeBSD) with (c) notes dating back to 2004, with 5 authors, 4 of whom are no longer my cow-orkers. As the unfortunate 5th, I am still doing tweaks to catch edge & corner cases >20y after the 1st author had the idea that rsync, shell, mt, & standard POSIX tools could be assembled into a decent free backup world.
Use Python. Or Go. Or even Perl.

My wife was just watching this movie. I'm on my computer, but noticed it has a pretty cool soundtrack.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy0RYiQRWUk

3D Reconstruction and Information Fusion between Dormant and Canopy Seasons in Commercial Orchards Using Deep Learning and Fast GICP
Ranjan Sapkota, Zhichao Meng, Martin Churuvija, Xiaoqiang Du, Zenghong Ma, Manoj Karkee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.01912

3D Reconstruction and Information Fusion between Dormant and Canopy Seasons in Commercial Orchards Using Deep Learning and Fast GICP
In orchard automation, dense foliage during the canopy season severely occludes tree structures, minimizing visibility to various canopy parts such as trunks and branches, which limits the ability of a machine vision system. However, canopy structure is more open and visible during the dormant season when trees are defoliated. In this work, we present an information fusion framework that integrates multi-seasonal structural data to support robotic and automated crop load management during the e…

Advancement and Field Evaluation of a Dual-arm Apple Harvesting Robot
Keyi Zhu, Kyle Lammers, Kaixiang Zhang, Chaaran Arunachalam, Siddhartha Bhattacharya, Jiajia Li, Renfu Lu, Zhaojian Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05714

Advancement and Field Evaluation of a Dual-arm Apple Harvesting Robot
Apples are among the most widely consumed fruits worldwide. Currently, apple harvesting fully relies on manual labor, which is costly, drudging, and hazardous to workers. Hence, robotic harvesting has attracted increasing attention in recent years. However, existing systems still fall short in terms of performance, effectiveness, and reliability for complex orchard environments. In this work, we present the development and evaluation of a dual-arm harvesting robot. The system integrates a ToF c…

Nos reíamos de que Reagan preguntara a una vidente decisiones de política durante su presidencia. Pues en Suecia estšn con la versión 3.0 de consultar a un oršculo: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/aug/05/chat-gpt-sw…

Is anyone familiar with The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher? I picked one up at a book swap, by total fluke the first in the series, and so far it's actually quite good. Given the premise I wasn't sure which way it would go.
This was an emergency book as I'd left my *actual* book in my work bag: Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard by Kiran Desai, which I'm really enjoying #books

Experimental observation of the spatio-temporal dynamics of breather gases in a recirculating fiber loop
Fran\c{c}ois Copie, Gino Biondini, Jeffrey Oregero, Gennady El, Pierre Suret, St\'ephane Randoux
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04787

Experimental observation of the spatio-temporal dynamics of breather gases in a recirculating fiber loop
We report the first experimental observation of breather gases (BGs) in optics, realized in a recirculating fiber loop enabling virtually lossless propagation over $1200$ km. Initiated by a slowly modulated optical background perturbed by noise, the BGs form through a nonlinear fission process and demonstrate spatiotemporal dynamics that align closely with numerical simulations of the focusing one-dimensional nonlinear Schrödinger equation. The minimal dissipation in our setup enables a statis…

Learning to Prune Branches in Modern Tree-Fruit Orchards
Abhinav Jain, Cindy Grimm, Stefan Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23015 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.…

Learning to Prune Branches in Modern Tree-Fruit Orchards
Dormant tree pruning is labor-intensive but essential to maintaining modern highly-productive fruit orchards. In this work we present a closed-loop visuomotor controller for robotic pruning. The controller guides the cutter through a cluttered tree environment to reach a specified cut point and ensures the cutters are perpendicular to the branch. We train the controller using a novel orchard simulation that captures the geometric distribution of branches in a target apple orchard configuration.…