Operational performance of a stationary robotic strawberry harvester with a picking mechanism that approaches target fruit from below.

摘要

We constructed a stationary robotic strawberry harvester consisting of an end-effector, a manipulator with seven degrees of freedom of motion, and an artificial visual system for target fruit identification. We tested the stationary robot in an experimental harvesting system in which we combined the robot with a movable bench unit. We examined the performance in 50 beds (each 1 m), each of which contained 10 strawberry plants. The system achieved a success rate of harvesting mature fruit of 67.1%, derived from a 89.0% success rate in detecting fruit position, 83.4% success rate in judging fruit coloration, and 90.3% success rate in picking targeted fruit. The rate of damage to harvested fruit was 12.5% and the rate of simultaneously picking non-targeted fruit in error was 13.9%. The average processing time per bed was 126.7 s at an average of 2.3 mature fruits per bed.