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 paral- lelization 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 holo- nomic 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.