GrowSplat: Constructing Temporal Digital Twins of Plants with Gaussian Splats

Accurate temporal reconstructions of plant growth are essential for plant phenotyping and breeding, yet remain challenging due to complex geometries, occlusions, and non-rigid deformations of plants. We present a novel framework for building temporal digital twins of plants by combining 3D Gaussian Splatting with a robust sample alignment pipeline. Our method begins by reconstructing Gaussian Splats from multi-view camera data, then leverages a two-stage registration approach: coarse alignment through feature-based matching and Fast Global Registration, followed by fine alignment with Iterative Closest Point. This pipeline yields a consistent 4D model of plant development in discrete time steps. We evaluate the approach on data from the Netherlands Plant Eco-phenotyping Center, demonstrating detailed temporal reconstructions of Sequoia and Quinoa species. Videos and Images can be seen at https://berkeleyautomation.github.io/GrowSplat/

Robotic Defect Inspection with Visual and Tactile Perception for Large-scale Components

In manufacturing processes, surface inspection is a key requirement for quality assessment and damage localization. Due to this, automated surface anomaly detection has become a promising area of research in various industrial inspection systems. A particular challenge in industries with large-scale components, like aircraft and heavy machinery, is inspecting large parts with very small defect dimensions. Moreover, these parts can be of curved shapes. To address this challenge, we present a 2-stage multi-modal inspection pipeline with visual and tactile sensing. Our approach combines the best of both visual and tactile sensing by identifying and localizing defects using a global view (vision) and using the localized area for tactile scanning for identifying remaining defects. To benchmark our approach, we propose a novel real-world dataset with multiple metallic defect types per image, collected in the production environments on real aerospace manufacturing parts, as well as online robot experiments in two environments. Our approach is able to identify 85% defects using Stage I and identify 100% defects after Stage II. The dataset is publicly available at https://zenodo.org/record/8327713