Publications

• Heiwolt, K., Mandil, W., Cielniak, G., & Hanheide, M. (2020). ‘Automated Topological Mapping for Agricultural Robots‘, UKRAS20 Conference: “Robots into the real world” Proceedings.
• Nazari, K., Mandil, W., Hanheide, M., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2021). ‘Tactile Dynamic Behaviour Prediction Based on Robot Action‘, Annual Conference Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS 2021).
• Nazari, K., Mandil, W. & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2022) Proactive slip control by learned slip model and trajectory adaptation. In: 6th Conference on Robot Learning, 14th-16th December 2022, Auckland, New Zealand.
• Mandil, W., Nazari, K., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2022) Action Conditioned Tactile Prediction: a case study on slip prediction. The Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022.
• Rajendran S.V., Mandil, W., Parsons, S., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2023) Acoustic Soft Tactile Skin (AST Skin). arXiv:2303.17355 [cs.RO].
• Mandil, W., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2023) Combining Vision and Tactile Sensation for Video Prediction. arXiv:2304.11193 [cs.RO].
• Rajendran S., Vishnu, D.B., Mghames, S., Mandil, W., Parsa, S., Parsons, S., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2023) Selective Harvesting Robots: A Review. Journal of Field Robotics . ISSN 1556-4959.
• Rajendran, V., Debnath, B., Mghames, S., Mandil, W., Parsa, S., Parsons, S., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2023) Towards autonomous selective harvesting: A review of robot perception, robot design, motion planning and control. Journal of Field Robotics, Early View.
• Mandil, W., Rajendran, V., Nazari, K., & Ghalamzan Esfahani, A. (2023) Tactile-Sensing Technologies: Trends, Challenges and Outlook in Agri-Food Manipulation. Sensors, 23(17), pp. 7362.
• Nazari, K., Gandolfi, G., Talebpour, Z., Rajendran, V., Mandil, W., Rocco, P., & Ghalamzan, A.E. (2023) Deep Functional Predictive Control for Strawberry Cluster Manipulation using Tactile Prediction, Preprint.

Presentations

• “Automated Topological Mapping for Agricultural Robots” (oral) – UKRAS20 Conference: “Robots into the real world” [April 2020] – Online.
• “Investigation into Harvesting Soft Fruit Clusters” (oral) – Lincoln Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems 2020 [October 2020] – Online.
• “Modelling Soft Fruit Clusters for Controlled Harvesting” (oral) – International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) Task-Informed Grasping Workshop – III [May 2021] – Online.
• “Visual perception for harvesting grapes” (oral) – AgriFoRwArdS CDT Summer School 2021 [June 2021] – Online.
• “Tactile prediction for controlled manipulation” (oral) – AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference 2021 [July 2021] – Online.
• “Action Conditioned Tactile Prediction: case study on slip prediction” (oral) – Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2022 [July 2022] – New York, USA.
• “Combining Visual and Tactile Sensation to Enhance Physical Robot Interactions” (poster) – Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) 2023 / AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference 2023 / Joint Robotics CDT Annual Conference 2023 [September 2023] – Cambridge, UK.

Other Activities

• Discussion Panel member at the AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference 2021 – Discussion topic: Bob Fisher’s keynote talk “The TrimBot2020 gardening robot and other agricultural robot issues” [July 2021] – Online.
• Represented the AgriFoRwArdS CDT at the COP26 United National Climate Change Conference in Glasgow including exhibiting the Robofruit robot [October 2021] – Glasgow, UK.
• Represented the AgriFoRwArdS CDT at the University of Lincoln British Science Week school outreach event – showcasing research and robotic demonstrations to delegates [March 2022] – Lincoln, UK.
• Represented the AgriFoRwArdS CDT in the AgriFoRwArdS CDT promotional video, including interview about experiences within the CDT and the agri-food robotics sector.
• Member of AgriFoRwArdS CDT Annual Conference 2022 discussion panel.
• Internship at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, focusing on reinforcement learning, manipulation, and language models (February to March 2023).
• Internship at the Toshiba Cambridge Research Laboratory, focusing on novel Reinforcement Learning methods for robotic manipulation tasks (November 2023 to February 2024).

MSc Project

Investigation into Harvesting Soft Fruit Clusters

We propose an investigation into harvesting soft fruit clusters with robotics. Separating the problem into two distinct problems: motion planning to grasp the soft fruit (task 1); motion planning to release the soft fruit from the cluster (task 2). We will apply probabilistic movement primitives updated with model predictive control to task 1 and a probabilistic movement primitive architecture to task 2. We intend to test task 1 on strawberry clusters and task 2 on mushroom clusters.

PhD Project

Data-driven methods for detecting fruit and planning harvesting actions in dense cluster (DPFH)

Selective harvesting of soft fruit is a very challenging problem involving computer vision, motion planning, motion control, scheduling, and optimisation. State-of-the-art (SOTA) robotic system for selective harvesting of soft fruits are still far away from a human performance level, partially because the conventional planning cannot provide a feasible solution for the robot to reach-and-pick the soft fruit.   

DPFH aims to develop SOTA method for interactive motion planning and control for picking soft-fruits in a cluster where the robot needs to push the occluding pieces away to (i) better detect, segment and localise a ripe fruit and (ii) reach-and-pick the ripe fruit. The effectiveness of the developed methods in this project will be demonstrated in simulation environments, in the lab with toy strawberries and in the strawberry field.

Willow’s PhD project is being carried out in collaboration with Berry Garden’s, with primary supervision by Dr Amir Ghalamzan Esfahani.