Agribot: A Robot for Aided Fruit Harvesting

Abstract

This work presents a robot prototype designed and built for a new aided harvesting strategy, involving a harmonic human-machine task distribution. In the entire system, the operator drives the vehicle which carries two picking arms and detects every piece of fruit pointing to it with a laser spot, while a telemeter supplies to the computer the precise location of the fruits that will be picked in an adequate sequence by the speciflc robot (arm and gripper) designed and developed for this purpose. Throughout this work, the speciflc design of every module of the fruit harvesting robot is presented. The system was built and tested under laboratory conditions and some flgures about its performance are also given.