There is an increasing concern that the traditional approach of natural kiwifruit pollination by bees may not be sustainable. The alternatives are currently too costly for most growers due to high labor requirements or inefficient usage of expensive pollen. This paper presents a performance evaluation of a novel kiwifruit pollinating robot designed to provide a more efficient, reliable, and cost‐effective means of producing kiwifruit. The robot comprises a novel air‐assisted sprayer, a machine vision system employing convolution neural networks, and a flower targeting system for efficient and effective application of pollen to individual flowers. We show that this pollination system is capable of individually targeting and pollinating 79.5% of flowers at 3.5 km/hr while using comparable amounts of pollen to commercial Cambrian operators. Furthermore, flowers that were successfully pollinated at 1 km/hr grew into the first robotically pollinated kiwifruit which were comparable in quality to commercially grown kiwifruit. However, the overall fruit set was found to be well below commercial requirements and further work on increasing the overall yield is required.

中文翻译：

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单个奇异果花的自主授粉：朝着机器人奇异果授粉者迈进

人们越来越担心蜜蜂对天然奇异果进行授粉的传统方法可能无法持续。由于劳动要求高或昂贵花粉的使用效率低，目前对于大多数种植者而言，替代品的成本太高。本文介绍了一种新型奇异果授粉机器人的性能评估，该机器人旨在提供一种更高效，可靠且具有成本效益的奇异果生产方法。该机器人包括一个新颖的空气辅助喷雾器，一个使用卷积神经网络的机器视觉系统以及一个将花粉高效有效地施加到单个花朵上的花朵定位系统。我们表明，该授粉系统能够以3.5 km / hr的速度单独定向和授粉79.5％的花朵，同时使用的花粉量与商业寒武纪运营商相当。此外，以1 km / hr成功授粉的花朵成长为第一个自动授粉的奇异果，其质量可与商业种植的奇异果相媲美。然而，发现总的坐果率远低于商业要求，并且需要进一步的工作以增加总产量。