A New Robot System for Harvesting Cucumber

Abstract

This paper describes a robot system for automated harvesting cucumber. A cultivation pattern with inclined trellis is proposed, which is not only suitable for cucumber automated harvesting, but also suitable for cucumber getting enough sunlight to grow. A manipulator with 6 DOF (degree of freedom) and its end-effector for cucumber picking were designed and manufactured. Using D-H spatial mechanism description method, link coordinate system and link parameters of harvesting robot are constructed, kinematics equation of harvesting robot is built, and its forward and inverse kinematics solutions are obtained. An open architecture control system with multi-processors is built based on PC and DSP-based motion control card, and control program of cucumber harvesting robot is programmed. Finally, the experiments of robot movement positioning accuracy and cucumber cutting effectiveness of end-effector are conducted in the laboratory environment, with promising results.