Real-Time Branch-to-Tool Distance Estimation for Autonomous UAV Pruning: Benchmarking Five DEFOM-Stereo Variants from Simulation to Jetson Deployment
Autonomous tree pruning with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a safety-critical real-world task: the onboard perception system must estimate the metric distance from a cutting tool to thin tree branches in real time so that the UAV can approach, align, and actuate the pruner without collision. We address this problem by training five variants of DEFOM-Stereo - a recent foundation-model-based stereo matcher - on a task-specific synthetic dataset and deploying the checkpoints on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Super 16 GB. The training corpus is built in Unreal Engine 5 with a simulated ZED Mini stereo camera capturing 5,520 stereo pairs across 115 tree instances from three viewpoints at 2m distanc...
| Authors | Yida Lin, Bing Xue, Mengjie Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CV |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 March 2026 |
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