Design of Stickbug: a Six-Armed Precision Pollination Robot

This work presents the design of Stickbug, a six-armed, multi-agent, precision pollination robot that combines the accuracy of single-agent systems with swarm parallelization in greenhouses. Precision pollination robots have often been proposed to offset the effects of a decreasing population of natural pollinators, but they frequently lack the required parallelization and scalability. Stickbug achieves this by allowing each arm and drive base to act as an individual agent, significantly reducing planning complexity. Stickbug uses a compact holonomic Kiwi drive to navigate narrow greenhouse rows, a tall mast to support multiple manipulators and reach plant heights, a detection model and classifier to identify Bramble flowers, and a felt-tipped end-effector for contact-based pollination. Initial experimental validation demonstrates that Stickbug can attempt over 1.5 pollinations per minute with a 49% success rate. Additionally, a Bramble flower perception dataset was created and is publicly available alongside Stickbug’s software and design files.