Design and fuzzy control of a robotic gripper for efficient strawberry harvesting

Dimeas, Fotios; Sako, Dhionis; Moulianitis, Vassilis C.; Aspragathos, Nikos Α.

doi:10.1017/s0263574714001155

Cited by 74 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 17 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…With an additional suction device, the scissor‐like end‐effector might be able to hold fruit (Feng, Wang, Zheng, Qiu, & Jiang, ; Hayashi et al, ). Contact grasping grippers are also common to see, such as the three‐finger clamps with force‐limit function (Dimeas et al, ) and two or more fingers with rotational motion to break peduncles (Yamamoto et al, ; OCTINION Ltd.). The scissor‐like gripper requires more advanced vision system to detect the peduncle position and might unintentionally cut surrounding plants in clusters (Hayashi et al, ; Xiong et al, ).…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

An autonomous strawberry‐harvesting robot: Design, development, integration, and field evaluation

Xiong

Grimstad

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

263

133

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper presents an autonomous robot capable of picking strawberries continuously in polytunnels. Robotic harvesting in cluttered and unstructured environment remains a challenge. A novel obstacle‐separation algorithm was proposed to enable the harvesting system to pick strawberries that are located in clusters. The algorithm uses the gripper to push aside surrounding leaves, strawberries, and other obstacles. We present the theoretical method to generate pushing paths based on the surrounding obstacles. In addition to manipulation, an improved vision system is more resilient to lighting variations, which was developed based on the modeling of color against light intensity. Further, a low‐cost dual‐arm system was developed with an optimized harvesting sequence that increases its efficiency and minimizes the risk of collision. Improvements were also made to the existing gripper to enable the robot to pick directly into a market punnet, thereby eliminating the need for repacking. During tests on a strawberry farm, the robots first‐attempt success rate for picking partially surrounded or isolated strawberries ranged from 50% to 97.1%, depending on the growth situations. Upon an additional attempt, the pick success rate increased to a range of 75–100%. In the field tests, the system was not able to pick a target that was entirely surrounded by obstacles. This failure was attributed to limitations in the vision system as well as insufficient dexterity in the grippers. However, the picking speed improved upon previous systems, taking just 6.1 s for manipulation operation in the one‐arm mode and 4.6 s in the two‐arm mode.

show abstract

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Generally, strawberry harvesting in cropping environment is very challenging. First, ripe strawberries are easily damaged and bruised (Dimeas, Sako, Moulianitis, & Aspragathos, 2015;Hayashi et al, 2014;Xiong et al, 2019). This feature requires gentle handling during manipulation procedures.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

An autonomous strawberry‐harvesting robot: Design, development, integration, and field evaluation

Xiong

Grimstad

et al. 2019

Journal of Field Robotics

263

133

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To date, researchers have developed several types of end-effectors for autonomous harvesting, such as suction devices [17], swallow devices [18], and scissor-like cutters [15]. The key component of an autonomous harvester is the end-effector that grasps and cuts the crop.…”

Section: Harvesting Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Autonomous Fruit and Vegetable Harvester with a Low-Cost Gripper Using a 3D Sensor

Zhang

Huang

You

et al. 2019

Sensors

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Reliable and robust systems to detect and harvest fruits and vegetables in unstructured environments are crucial for harvesting robots. In this paper, we propose an autonomous system that harvests most types of crops with peduncles. A geometric approach is first applied to obtain the cutting points of the peduncle based on the fruit bounding box, for which we have adapted the model of the state-of-the-art object detector named Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN). We designed a novel gripper that simultaneously clamps and cuts the peduncles of crops without contacting the flesh. We have conducted experiments with a robotic manipulator to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed harvesting system in being able to efficiently harvest most crops in real laboratory environments. Sensors 2020, 20, 93 2 of 15 the crop peduncle based on the Mask Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Mask R-CNN) algorithm [10].The rest of this paper is organized as follows: In Section 2, we introduce related work. In Section 3, we describe the design of the gripper and provide a mechanical analysis. In Section 4, we present the approach of cutting-point detection. In Section 5, we describe an experimental robotic system to demonstrate the harvesting process for artificial and real fruits and vegetables. Conclusions and future work are given in Section 6. Related WorkDuring the last few decades, many systems have been developed for the autonomous harvesting of soft crops, ranging from cucumber [11] and tomato-harvesting robots [12] to sweet-pepper [2,13] and strawberry-picking apparatus [14,15]. The work in [16] demonstrated a sweet-pepper-harvesting robot that achieved a success rate of 6% in unstructured environments. This work highlighted the difficulty and complexity of the harvesting problem. The key research challenges include manipulation tools along with the harvesting process, and perception of target fruits and vegetables with the cutting points.

show abstract

“…However, efficient and reliable strawberry harvesting has proved extremely difficult for several reasons. First of all, strawberries are easily damaged mechanically, which requires gentle handling when harvesting [2]. Secondly, strawberry harvest requires highly selective procedures [3] because they tend to ripen very unevenly, giving large differences in color and size, and requiring multiple harvesting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The concept of a construction solution of a robot for harvesting strawberries

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Strawberry fruit products are of high commercial and consumption value, while difficult to harvest due to their very low mechanical strength and difficulties in identifying them within the plants. Therefore, robots harvesting strawberries should connect four subsystems: vision of detection, delivery arm (manipulator), effector (harvesting head), and finally-a platform increasing the working space adapted to the size of the farm. The presented work of the conceptual working section of a combine for harvesting strawberry fruit from crops, carried out in rows or cultivation ridge, from cultivation on field and/ or under covers will meet the requirements for: work productivity, quality of harvested fruit, reduction of the amount of pollution. To requirements have been met, the developed concept of constructions adopted the principle of operation during the first phase of the harvesting (in the natural distribution of fruit within the plants of strawberries) and the working of the work arm head (based on image analysis, initially general, and in the last phase of detailed) maneuvering in surrounded by harvested fruit and machine.

show abstract

Design and fuzzy control of a robotic gripper for efficient strawberry harvesting

Cited by 74 publications

References 17 publications

An autonomous strawberry‐harvesting robot: Design, development, integration, and field evaluation

An autonomous strawberry‐harvesting robot: Design, development, integration, and field evaluation

An Autonomous Fruit and Vegetable Harvester with a Low-Cost Gripper Using a 3D Sensor

The concept of a construction solution of a robot for harvesting strawberries

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About