Strawberry harvesting robot for fruits grown on table top culture

Abstract

We have been developing strawberry harvesting robot for harvesting in a table top culture greenhouse. A strawberry harvesting robot consisted of a 3 DOF manipulator, an end-effecter, machine vision system and a traveling device. An end-effecter, which consisted of a suction head connected to a blower and tow fingers could hold on fruit by suction head and cut and grasp peduncle by two fingers rotate according to peduncle inclination. Machine vision system, which consisted of three identical color cameras (stereo vision system and center camera) and five LED lighting device could calculate fruits location of 3 dimension and recognize target fruit and peduncle details. From harvesting experiments at May 2007, it was observed that 38% of fruits were harvested. Corresponding problems were miss-stereo matching and false recognition of fruit and peduncle.