BLOB analysis of an automatic vision guided system for a fruit picking and placing robot

Abstract

The agriculture efficiency can be increased by robotics application. This paper presents the BLOB analysis method as the visual cue for a harvest handling robot. BLOB analysis is achieved by filtering objects and extracting BLOB using morphological operators to detect fruit based on colour and shape. The online images are captured by a PI camera functioning as an 'eye' for the robot, where the image plane is a 600 × 480-pixel frame. Experiments were conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method where the average time of picking and placing fruit is 6.69 s for fruit in position 1 with a range of 332-334 of x and 255-266 of y coordinates respectively, and 7.63 s for position 2 with a range of 475-576 in x and 205-206 of y coordinates. The experiment shows that the proposed method is effective as an automatic vision guided system for a fruit picking and placing robot.