Development of an End-Effector for a Tomato Cluster Harvesting Robot

Kondo, Naoshi; Yata, Koki; Iida, Michihisa; Shiigi, Tomoo; Monta, Mitsuji; Kurita, Mitsutaka; Omori, Hiromi

doi:10.1016/s1881-8366(10)80007-2

Cited by 74 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Unlike sweet pepper, in crops like tomato or cucumber the distance between fruits and main stem is commonly wider, and occluding leaves are picked as part of plant maintenance. These differences may partly explain the higher harvest success reported in related work: 50% for tomato (Kondo et al., ), 74% for cucumber (Van Henten et al., ), and 41% for strawberry (Hayashi et al., ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Performance Evaluation of a Harvesting Robot for Sweet Pepper

Bac

Hemming

Tuijl

et al. 2017

Journal of Field Robotics

182

103

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This paper evaluates a robot developed for autonomous harvesting of sweet peppers in a commercial greenhouse. Objectives were to assess robot performance under unmodified and simplified crop conditions, using two types of end effectors (Fin Ray; Lip type), and to evaluate the performance contribution of stem‐dependent determination of the grasp pose. We describe and discuss the performance of hardware and software components developed for fruit harvesting in a complex environment that includes lighting variation, occlusions, and densely spaced obstacles. After simplifying the crop, harvest success significantly improved from 6% to 26% (Fin Ray) and from 2% to 33% (Lip type). We observed a decrease in stem damage and an increase in grasp success after enabling stem‐dependent determination of the grasp pose. Generally, the robot had difficulty in successfully picking sweet peppers and we discuss possible causes. The robot's novel capability of perceiving the stem of a plant may serve as useful functionality for future robots.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 90%

Performance Evaluation of a Harvesting Robot for Sweet Pepper

Bac

Hemming

Tuijl

et al. 2017

Journal of Field Robotics

182

103

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“…In these approaches, the gripper and the cutter are mounted at fixed offsets with each other and require the crop and peduncle to fit within the fixed offset for a successful detachment. An added DOF between the gripper and cutter can be included to tackle this problem (Kondo et al, 2010), but can add to the complexity of the end effector design. A disadvantage of a scissor mechanism is the potential to damage surrounding parts of the plant (Hemming, van Tuijl, Bac, & Barth, 2013).…”

Section: Harvesting Tools and Manipulatorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Performance improvements of a sweet pepper harvesting robot in protected cropping environments

Lehnert

McCool

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

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Using robots to harvest sweet peppers in protected cropping environments has remained unsolved despite considerable effort by the research community over several decades. In this paper, we present the robotic harvester, Harvey, designed for sweet peppers in protected cropping environments that achieved a 76.5% success rate on 68 fruit (within a modified scenario) which improves upon our prior work which achieved 58% on 24 fruit and related sweet pepper harvesting work which achieved 33% on 39 fruit (for their best tool in a modified scenario). This improvement was primarily achieved through the introduction of a novel peduncle segmentation system using an efficient deep convolutional neural network, in conjunction with three‐dimensional postfiltering to detect the critical cutting location. We benchmark the peduncle segmentation against prior art demonstrating an improvement in performance with a F1 score of 0.564 compared to 0.302. The robotic harvester uses a perception pipeline to detect a target sweet pepper and an appropriate grasp and cutting pose used to determine the trajectory of a multimodal harvesting tool to grasp the sweet pepper and cut it from the plant. A novel decoupling mechanism enables the gripping and cutting operations to be performed independently. We perform an in‐depth analysis of the full robotic harvesting system to highlight bottlenecks and failure points that future work could address.

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“…Kondo [4] experimentally investigated the natural frequency of tomato tufts to introduce a model of tomato tufts, and introduced them into manipulator trajectory planning. The harvesting mechanism (end-effector) for harvesting tomatoes is also an important research subject [4,5], and methods such as cutting from stems, breaking, and suction are proposed. Taking advantage of the recent development of computers, real-time image processing technology has also been developed.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Toward Smart Tomato Greenhouse: The Fourth Tomato Harvesting Robot Competition

Matsuo¹,

Sonoda²,

Takemura³

et al. 2019

JRNAL

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Agriculture, one of the most important industries for human life, is faced with serious problems, the shortage of workers, the falling birthrate and the aging population, global warming and natural disasters, etc. Tomato is one of the most important fruit vegetables, and most tomatoes in Japan are cultivated in the greenhouses, or large scale farms as the solution for effective production toward smart greenhouses, whereas the high temperature and high humidity, construction and management costs are big problems and technologies such as environmental control system, factory automation technology, AI, robotics are required. We had held Tomato Harvesting Robot competition from 2014 toward realization of smart tomato greenhouse aiming at promote the automated tomato harvesting to reduce the working time of harvesting. In this paper, we report on the tomato harvesting robot competition and the results mainly from the fourth competition.

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Development of an End-Effector for a Tomato Cluster Harvesting Robot

Cited by 74 publications

References 2 publications

Performance Evaluation of a Harvesting Robot for Sweet Pepper

Performance Evaluation of a Harvesting Robot for Sweet Pepper

Performance improvements of a sweet pepper harvesting robot in protected cropping environments

Toward Smart Tomato Greenhouse: The Fourth Tomato Harvesting Robot Competition

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