Automation technologies for strawberry harvesting and packing operations in Japan1

Abstract

This paper describes a strawberry-harvesting robot, a packing robot, and a movable bench system. The harvesting and packing operations in strawberry production require harder, more time-consuming work compared to other operations such as transplanting and chemical spraying, making automation of these tasks desirable. Since harvesting and packing operation account for half of total working hours, automation of these tasks are strongly desired. First of all, based on the findings of many studies on strawberry-harvesting robots for soil culture and elevated substrate culture, our institute of the Bio-oriented Technology Research Advancement Institution and Shibuya Seiki developed a commercial model of a strawberry-harvesting robot, which is chiefly composed a cylindrical manipulator, machine vision, an end-effector, and traveling platform. The results showed an average 54.9% harvesting success rate, 8.6 s cycle time of picking operation, and 102.5 m/h work efficiency in hanging-type growing beds in an experimental greenhouse. Secondly, a prototype automatic packing robot consisting of a supply unit and a packing unit was developed. The supply unit picks up strawberries from a harvesting container, and the packing unit sucks each fruit from calyx side and locates its orientation into a tray. Performance testing showed that automatic packing had a task success rate of 97.3%, with a process time per fruit of 7.3 s. Thirdly, a movable bench system was developed, which makes planting beds rotate in longitudinal and lateral ways. This system brought high density production and labour saving operation at a fixed position, such as crop maintenance and harvesting. By setting up the main body of a strawberry-harvesting robot on working space, unmanned operation technique was developed and tested in an experimental greenhouse. Field experiments of these new automation technologies were conducted and gave a potential of practical use.

Towards Robust Product Packing with a Minimalistic End-Effector

“…Such inaccuracies have been considered in the context of efforts relating to the Amazon Robotics Challenge [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] but most of these systems do not deal with bin packing. Most deployments of automatic packing use mechanical components, such as conveyor trays, that are specifically designed for certain products [18], rendering them difficult to customize and deploy. Industrial packing systems also assume that the objects are already mechanically sorted before packing.…”

Review of Robotic Technology for Strawberry Production

“…The sharp distinction of colors between the mature strawberry fruits and other parts of the plant can facilitate the detection process. Most of the strawberry harvesting robots have used digital RGB cameras with CCD or CMOS imaging sensors to seek red color in successive image frames on-the-go [Arima et al, 2001;Tarrio et al, 2006;Guo et al, 2008;Hayashi et al, 2009Hayashi et al, , 2010aHayashi et al, , 2010bHayashi et al, , 2012Hayashi et al, , 2014aHayashi et al, , 2014b (mobile harvesting robot); Rajendra et al, 2009Rajendra et al, , 2011Takeshita et al, 2010;Feng et al, 2012aFeng et al, , 2012bCui et al, 2013]. CCD digital cameras provide high quality imagery, but they are expensive.…”

“…Mobility of the robot is not required for sorting and packing operations due to conveyor belts that bring the fruits in front of working station, i.e. sorting or packing robot [Hayashi et al, 2011b[Hayashi et al, , 2014b].…”

“…In a recently developed traveling system in a greenhouse, one of the two harvesting robots was motionless while the bench unit moved [Hayashi et al, 2014b (stationary harvesting robot)] on a rail system. The benches had a circulating motion by constrained by the rail system in the greenhouse and they came in front of the stationary harvesting robot for the harvesting operation [Hayashi et al, 2014b (stationary harvesting robot)]. In another study, the longitudinal and lateral transmitting units are driven by electric motors so that benches gain mobility by help of these transmitting units (Yamamoto et al, 2009).…”

“…For the enhanced version of this robot, another DOF was added as a rotary joint of the end-effectors, allowing it to rotate to certain angular positions (Hayashi et al, 2012). Hayashi et al [2011bHayashi et al [ , 2014b [a] ; National Robotics Engineering Center (2014); Xu et al (2014) [a] Combined moving bench and mobile robot Hayashi et al [2009Hayashi et al [ , 2010aHayashi et al [ , 2012Hayashi et al [ , 2013Hayashi et al [ , 2014aHayashi et al [ , 2014b (mobile harvesting robot)]; Nagasaki et al (2010, 2013) [a] The robot is either planned to be developed or currently under development.…”