Design and Test of Harvesting Robot for Table-top Cultivated Strawberry

Abstract

Aiming at the practical need of automatic harvesting for fresh fruit, a new harvesting robot system was designed for strawberry cultivated on table-top in China, and its working principle and key components were introduced in detail. It can automatically walk along rows of strawberries, identify and locate ripe strawberries, grasp and cut strawberry stalks. Finally, the field test and performance evaluation of the harvesting robot prototype were carried out. Although successfully harvesting a fruit averagely need attempt 1.23 times, the results showed 84% of the mature fruits for test were successfully harvested. The average harvesting time on one fruit including failed and successful harvesting cycles was 10.92 sec and the average time for successfully harvesting one fruit was 10.7 sec. And a single harvesting cycle cost 8 sec, including 4 sec for visually locating with distant and close combined views.