Project Overview #

Since there are quite a lot of steps involved in the data flow, this section is dedicated to explaining them individually.

1. The first step in creating a digital twin of the garden is the data acquisition. Therefore, Nature Robots is currently developing the autonomously navigating robot Lero¹. By using two RGB-D cameras, a point cloud as well as images of the bed can be recorded.

   

2. After recording the data, it needs to be processed in order to extract information. Such information includes bounding boxes around the plants, so their position is known. Additionally, algorithms are being designed to automatically detect diseases and water deficiency.

3. The data including the extracted information is then saved in SEEREP². SEEREP is an abbreviation for Spatio-Temporal-SEmantic Environment REPresentation. To put it in simple terms, it is a database which can store point clouds and images in addition with meta-information and semantic labels. The data in SEEREP can then be queried over three modalities of time, location and semantic meaning.

   

4. After the data is stored in SEEREP, it can be used by the Digital Logbook. The Digital Logbook consists of a backend written in Django³ and a frontend written in Vue⁴. The two components communicate via a REST-API. The main task of the backend is the data management from SEEREP and the application specific database. The Vue frontend provides an easy to use web interface to access the digital twin of the garden. For more technical details, have a look at the architecture section.