Towards high-quality 3D scans of orchards for automated pruning

Due to increasing labour costs and shortages, automatisation of tree pruning is desirable. This requires accurate 3D models of orchards, which robots can use for navigation and for making decisions about which branches to prune. We propose a pipeline to create high-quality coloured 3D point clouds of orchards during the pruning season. We demonstrate that our method, which combines LiDAR and RGB sensing, is able to reconstruct orchards with finer details and fewer artefacts compared to classical photogrammetry methods relying solely on RGB images.