VinePT-Map: Pole-Trunk Semantic Mapping for Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Vineyards

Giorgio Audrito1,2 Mauro Martini1,3 Alessandro Navone1,3 Giorgia Galluzzo1 Marcello Chiaberge1,3

1 Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

2 giorgio_audrito@polito.it

3 PoliTO Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics (PIC4SeR)

Autonomous rover navigating through a vineyard row with clear view of trunks and blue support poles

Persistent Semantic Landmarks

Mapping vine trunks and support poles across multiple seasons for robust autonomous navigation.

Abstract

Reliable long-term deployment of autonomous robots in agricultural environments remains challenging due to perceptual aliasing, seasonal variability, and the dynamic nature of crop canopies. Vineyards, characterized by repetitive row structures and significant visual changes across phenological stages, represent a pivotal field challenge, limiting the robustness of conventional feature-based localization and mapping approaches. This paper introduces VinePT-Map, a semantic mapping framework that leverages vine trunks and support poles as persistent structural landmarks to enable season-agnostic and resilient robot localization. The proposed method formulates the mapping problem as a factor graph, integrating GPS, IMU, and RGB-D observations through robust geometrical constraints that exploit vineyard structure. An efficient perception pipeline based on instance segmentation and tracking, combined with a clustering filter for outlier rejection and pose refinement, enables accurate landmark detection using low-cost sensors and onboard computation. To validate the pipeline, we present a multi-season dataset for trunk and pole segmentation and tracking. Extensive field experiments conducted across diverse seasons demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed approach, highlighting its suitability for long-term autonomous operation in agricultural environments.

Methodology Overview

1. Multimodal Inputs

Fusion of consumer-grade RGB-D camera data, IMU preintegration, and RTK-GPS fixes.

2. Visual Perception

Real-time instance segmentation (YOLOv8-seg) and robust multi-object tracking (BoT-SORT) of poles and trunks.

3. Semantic Mapping

Factor graph optimization via iSAM2. Includes deferred landmark commitment, outlier rejection, and spatial clustering.

Key Contributions

Citation

@article{audrito2026vineptmap,
  title={VinePT-Map: Pole-Trunk Semantic Mapping for Resilient Autonomous Robotics in Vineyards},
  author={Audrito, Giorgio and Martini, Mauro and Navone, Alessandro and Galluzzo, Giorgia and Chiaberge, Marcello},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.05070},
  year={2026}
}