Pollinator-safe orchard automation

Smarter drones for smarter orchards.

Drone Bloom explores drone-based blossom thinning and geospatial mapping to reduce pesticide reliance and protect pollinators—starting with apple orchards.

Top-down mapping pass Grid mission lines with waypoints over orchard tiles; drones following paths.

Why Drone Bloom?

Many orchards use chemical thinning (e.g., Sevin) to manage bloom density. Drone Bloom explores a precise, cost-effective, data-driven robotic alternative that reduces chemical use while sustaining yields and protecting pollinators.

Project Goals
  • Assess the ecological impact of Sevin (carbaryl) on pollinators. (Tessenderlo Kerley, Inc., 2013)
  • Analyze the prevalence and application practices of Sevin use on apple orchards across the United States.
  • Establish collaborative relationships with one or more orchards to support future research and field experiments.
  • Partner with the Robotarium at Georgia Tech to design and implement a 3D drone testing environment.
  • Prototype an espalier-based orchard architecture optimized for full automation. (Wisconsin Division of Extension, 2025)
  • Develop a robotic arm prototype capable of thinning apple stems with at least 95% accuracy.
  • Build and test a drone system capable of generating accurate geospatial maps of orchard tree locations.

Robotic Arm Technologies

  • Perception: opencv-python, numpy, scikit-image, open3d, apriltag
  • Detection/Segmentation: ultralytics (YOLOv8), torch, torchvision, detectron2 or mmdetection, segment-anything
  • Robotics & Planning: rclpy (ROS 2), moveit_commander / MoveIt 2 Python, ikpy, modern_robotics, pybullet, mujoco
  • Math / Utils: scipy, control, trimesh, shapely, pyyaml, pydantic
  • Data & Labeling: label-studio-sdk or cvat-sdk, albumentations, wandb (optional)
  • Camera: pyrealsense2 (or ZED Python)

Drone Mapping Technologies

  • Core Geo: geopandas, shapely, pyproj, rasterio, gdal, rtree
  • Vision / 3D: opencv-python, scikit-image, open3d, laspy, scikit-learn
  • Flight: mavsdk, pymavlink
  • Math / Utils: numpy, pandas, matplotlib, pydantic, tqdm
  • Data & Labeling: label-studio-sdk or cvat-sdk, albumentations
  • Camera: Global shutter cameras; Sony series; industrial USB

Collaborate

Researchers, growers, and sponsors welcome. Pilot sites, datasets, and safety-first trials are our next steps.

Email: mudanic@mudanic.com

Quick Links

References
  1. Tessenderlo Kerley, Inc. (Jan. 2013). Sevin® Product Information: Apple Thinning. Tech. rep. Accessed: 2025-08-27. Tessenderlo Kerley, Inc. URL: PDF.
  2. Mercier Orchards (2025). Mercier Orchards. URL: https://mercier-orchards.com/. Accessed: 2025-08-27.
  3. Wisconsin Division of Extension (2025). Espalier. URL: https://hort.extension.wisc.edu/articles/espalier/. Accessed: 2025-08-30.