Study on the Annual Utilization of a Harvesting Robot for Forcing Culture in Strawberries

Abstract

We aimed to determine the feasibility and study the technical aspects of annual utilization of a developed harvesting robot for forcing culture in strawberries. Therefore, we tested the harvesting ability of the robot in an elevated substrate culture throughout the harvest season. We found that the overall rate of successful harvesting was 41.3%. This rate tended to increase with plant growth and was greatly influenced by infructescence. Moreover, the rate varied with physiological changes of plants : 10-30% in the starting season of harvesting (late December) or the season in which fruit clusters were replaced, 30-50% in the season excluding the fruit cluster replacement after February, and 50% or more in the season just before the replacement of fruit clusters. In order to increase the rate of successful harvesting, it is important to harvest easily accessible fruits ; therefore, it would be necessary to develop a novel image processing algorithm for assessing such accessibility.