Abstract
Many labor-intensive tasks in fruit production such as pruning require physically interacting with the plant (e.g., pushing, pulling, bending limbs, etc.). Due to increasing labor shortages, there is widespread interest in the adoption of robotics in this area. When the robot must physically interact with the system, a deformable model of the plant is beneficial. Coupled, spring-loaded beams have been used in prior work to build deformable plant models in simulation for learning, planning, and control, but this approach has rarely been validated against the mechanical properties of real-world plants. In this paper, we use this rigid-body model, grounded in real material properties and beam bending theory, to simulate the deformation of blueberry canes under loading. To validate the model, we simulate the canes in MuJoCo and compare their behavior with real-world data collected from probing canes at a commercial farm with a custom testbed. We perform sensitivity analysis on several key modeling variables and show that this approach is highly sensitive to the plant diameter calculations and a priori flexural modulus estimation, which is dependent on season and blueberry variety. We also share our dataset of live blueberry cane deformation, including RGB-D images and measured forces and displacements.
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Publication details
- Journal
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
Kolano, H., VanAtter, C., Yang, W., Grimm, C., & Davidson, J. R. (2026). How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes
MLA 9
Kolano, Hannah, et al. "How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes.
Chicago (author–date)
Kolano, Hannah, Chelse VanAtter, Wei Yang, Cindy Grimm, and Joseph R. Davidson. 2026. "How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes.
Harvard
Kolano, H., VanAtter, C., Yang, W., Grimm, C. and Davidson, J. R. (2026) 'How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes.
Vancouver
Kolano H, VanAtter C, Yang W, Grimm C, Davidson JR. How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes
IEEE
H. Kolano, C. VanAtter, W. Yang, C. Grimm, and J. R. Davidson, "How Well Do Pseudo-Rigid Body Models Capture Real Plants? In-Field Validation of Simulated Blueberry Canes," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/how-well-do-pseudo-rigid-body-models-capture-real-plants-in-field-validation-of-simulated-blueberry-canes.