# PATHoBot: A Robot for Glasshouse Crop Phenotyping and Intervention

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.16272 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.16272/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 30 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [FruitNeRF: A Unified Neural Radiance Field based Fruit Counting Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06190/) (2024)
- [PAg-NeRF: Towards fast and efficient end-to-end panoptic 3D representations for agricultural robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.05339/) (2023)
- [Panoptic Mapping with Fruit Completion and Pose Estimation for Horticultural Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08923/) (2023)
- [NBV-SC: Next Best View Planning based on Shape Completion for Fruit Mapping and Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.15376/) (2022)
- [Virtual Temporal Samples for Recurrent Neural Networks: applied to semantic segmentation in agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10118/) (2021)
- [PLANesT-3D: A new annotated dataset for segmentation of 3D plant point clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21150/) (2024)
- [Few-Shot Adaptation of Grounding DINO for Agricultural Domain](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07252/) (2025)
- [Explicitly incorporating spatial information to recurrent networks for agriculture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13406/) (2022)
- [Track Any Peppers: Weakly Supervised Sweet Pepper Tracking Using VLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06702/) (2024)
- [A Dataset and Benchmark for Shape Completion of Fruits for Agricultural Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.13304/) (2024)
- [Horticultural Temporal Fruit Monitoring via 3D Instance Segmentation and Re-Identification using Colored Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07799/) (2024)
- [Development and evaluation of automated localisation and reconstruction of all fruits on tomato plants in a greenhouse based on multi-view perception and 3D multi-object tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02760/) (2022)
- [3D Hierarchical Panoptic Segmentation in Real Orchard Environments Across Different Sensors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13188/) (2025)
- [CropNeRF: A Neural Radiance Field-Based Framework for Crop Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00207/) (2026)
- [Still image and spatial-temporal tomato data enabling detection, segmentation, tracking, and video-instance segmentation using strong and weak labels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14934/) (2026)
- [Forecasting the Number of Harvest-ready Fruits of Sweet Peppers Using Multimodal Time-Series Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19975/) (2026)
- [ST-LoRA: Single Trajectory LoRA Ensemble for Uncertainty Aware Agricultural Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.01530/) (2026)
- [DropClick: Semi-Automated One-Click Segmentation for Agricultural Robotic Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03680/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present PATHoBot an autonomous crop surveying and intervention robot for glasshouse environments. The aim of this platform is to autonomously gather high quality data and also estimate key phenotypic parameters. To achieve this we retro-fit an off-the-shelf pipe-rail trolley with an array of multi-modal cameras, navigation sensors and a robotic arm for close surveying tasks and intervention. In this paper we describe PATHoBot design choices made to ensure proper operation in a commercial glasshouse environment. As a surveying platform we collect a number of datasets which include both sweet pepper and tomatoes. We show how PATHoBot enables novel surveillance approaches by first improving our previous work on fruit counting by incorporating wheel odometry and depth information. We find that by introducing re-projection and depth information we are able to achieve an absolute improvement of 20 points over the baseline technique in an "in the wild" situation. Finally, we present a 3D mapping case study, further showcasing PATHoBot's crop surveying capabilities.