Design and Prototype Verification of a Fruit Harvesting Picker

摘要

The paper proposes a design scheme for a fruit harvesting picker that can realize precise and efficient continuous operations of fruit picking through ingenious mechanisms, so as to address the problems currently existing in fruit picking operations, such as low efficiency and no security assurance of high-attitude operators and reduce the picking costs. With the functions to pick, collect and pack fruits, the picker is comprised of three major mechanisms: Transmission Mechanism, Picking Mechanism and Fruit Collecting Mechanism. The picker, whose shape and size can be changed flexibly, is not only used for picking a single type of fruit, but also designed to be able to pick various kinds of fruits, which can be realized through minor changes of its cutter. Based on the design scheme, a prototype was built, and picking experiments were carried out, which proved the effectiveness of the design.