Autonomous Vineyard Canopy and Yield Estimation

Vineyard managers want to know the state of their vines — both the size of the vine canopy and the predicted harvest yield. Such information can be used to manage vine vegetative and reproductive growth to improve the efficiency of vineyard operations. Traditional industry practices for gathering crop and canopy estimates are labor-intensive, expensive, destructive, imprecise, spatially coarse and do not scale to large vineyards. The research project aims to design and demonstrate new sensor technologies for autonomously gathering crop and canopy size estimates from a vineyard — expediently, precisely, accurately and at high-resolution — with the goal to improve vineyard efficiency by enabling producers to measure and manage the principal components of grapevine production on an individual vine basis.