OctoSplat: Hybrid OctoMap-Gaussian Splatting for Active Semantic Mapping and Phenotyping with Horticultural Robots
Semantic reconstruction of agricultural scenes plays a vital role in tasks such as phenotyping and yield estimation. However, traditional approaches based on manual scanning or fixed camera setups remain a major bottleneck, while active-mapping methods based solely on occupancy grids are too coarse for accurate trait estimation. To address this gap, we propose an active 3D reconstruction framework for horticultural environments using a mobile manipulator. The system integrates OctoMap with 3D Gaussian Splatting to enable accurate and efficient target-aware mapping. A low-resolution OctoMap provides probabilistic occupancy information for informative viewpoint selection and collision-free planning, while 3D Gaussian Splatting leverages geometric, photometric, and semantic information to optimize 3D Gaussians for high-fidelity scene reconstruction. We further introduce a robust mapping strategy that mitigates semantic segmentation and depth noise, together with a background pruning method that reduces memory and computational cost. We validate our framework across simulated, laboratory, and real greenhouse scenes, showing consistent improvements across three state-of-the-art Gaussian Splatting backbones. In simulation, where ground-truth geometry is available, our approach outperforms occupancy-based mapping in both reconstruction accuracy and runtime efficiency: compared with a 0.01m-resolution OctoMap, it doubles the fruit-level F1 score under noisy conditions while achieving up to a threefold reduction in runtime. Beyond simulation, novel-view synthesis quality also improves consistently in laboratory and real greenhouse environments, with PSNR and mIoU improving by up to 1.5 dB and 18%, respectively. Finally, the reconstructed semantic maps enable fruit counting and volume estimation with accuracies approaching 80%.