Design of an advanced prototype robot for white asparagus harvesting

Abstract

Agricultural workplaces are a prototypical example of unstructured and variant environments, offering a novel challenge to robotic research and automation. In this paper, a robot prototype is presented for white asparagus harvesting. White asparagus is a rather delicate vegetable with unique cultivation characteristics, which is exceptionally tiring and laborious to collect and requires specialized workers for harvesting. In this paper, we propose an integrated robotic system able to move in the field, identify white asparagus stems and collect them without damaging them. We highlight the design decisions for every module of the harvester and outline the overall architecture of the system.