# Botany-Bot: Digital Twin Monitoring of Occluded and Underleaf Plant Structures with Gaussian Splats

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.17783 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17783/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 20 Oct 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Nerfstudio: A Modular Framework for Neural Radiance Field Development](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04264/) (2023)
- [ALOHA Unleashed: A Simple Recipe for Robot Dexterity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13126/) (2024)
- [Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07931/) (2023)
- [Dex-NeRF: Using a Neural Radiance Field to Grasp Transparent Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14217/) (2021)
- [GARField: Group Anything with Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09419/) (2024)
- [Language Embedded Radiance Fields for Zero-Shot Task-Oriented Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07970/) (2023)
- [GaussianGrasper: 3D Language Gaussian Splatting for Open-vocabulary Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09637/) (2024)
- [PermutoSDF: Fast Multi-View Reconstruction with Implicit Surfaces using Permutohedral Lattices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12562/) (2022)
- [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)
- [View-Consistent Hierarchical 3D Segmentation Using Ultrametric Feature Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.19678/) (2024)
- [Field Robot for High-throughput and High-resolution 3D Plant Phenotyping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11516/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [RoboVista: Evaluating Vision Language Models for Diverse Robot Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04610/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Commercial plant phenotyping systems using fixed cameras cannot perceive many plant details due to leaf occlusion. In this paper, we present Botany-Bot, a system for building detailed "annotated digital twins" of living plants using two stereo cameras, a digital turntable inside a lightbox, an industrial robot arm, and 3D segmentated Gaussian Splat models. We also present robot algorithms for manipulating leaves to take high-resolution indexable images of occluded details such as stem buds and the underside/topside of leaves. Results from experiments suggest that Botany-Bot can segment leaves with 90.8% accuracy, detect leaves with 86.2% accuracy, lift/push leaves with 77.9% accuracy, and take detailed overside/underside images with 77.3% accuracy. Code, videos, and datasets are available at https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/Botany-Bot/.