Development of an agriculture robot aimed at participating in tomato robot competition

Abstract

This paper presents study of about the robot which is able to harvest tomatoes. To harvest the farm products such as tomatoes is performed by farmers now. So many farmers have problem that much cost and time are spent. Therefore, to solve this problem, we develop the robot that performs tomato harvesting. First, we produced and developed the robot hand using scissors to harvest tomatoes. Second, to harvest tomatoes is needed to shorten the time to harvest, so we tried to produce the robot arm to shorten the seek time toward tomatoes and the time to harvest tomatoes earlier than last year's one. Third we developed the robot that performs tomato harvesting by visual recognition. And the purpose of image processing, to recognize a flesh tomato by using HSV conversion and search the optimal value of hue, saturation, value experimentally. In addition, our laboratory took part in a tomato harvesting robot competition held in Kyushu Institute of Technology in December 2015.