Vision-Based Localization Method for Picking Points in Tea-Harvesting Robots

To address the issue of accurately recognizing and locating picking points for tea-picking robots in unstructured environments, a visual positioning method based on RGB-D information fusion is proposed. First, an improved T-YOLOv8n model is proposed, which improves detection and segmentation performance across multi-scale scenes through network architecture and loss function optimizations. In the far-view test set, the detection accuracy of tea buds reached 80.8%; for the near-view test set, the mAP_0.5 values for tea stem detection in bounding boxes and masks reached 93.6% and 93.7%, respectively, showing improvements of 9.1% and 14.1% over the baseline model. Secondly, a layered visual servoing strategy for near and far views was designed, integrating the RealSense depth sensor with robotic arm cooperation. This strategy identifies the region of interest (ROI) of the tea bud in the far view and fuses the stem mask information with depth data to calculate the three-dimensional coordinates of the picking point. The experiments show that this method achieved a picking point localization success rate of 86.4%, with a mean depth measurement error of 1.43 mm. The proposed method improves the accuracy of picking point recognition and reduces depth information fluctuations, providing technical support for the intelligent and rapid picking of premium tea.