Development of a Tomato Harvesting Robot with a Vision System Using Specular Reflection (Part 2)

——Vehicle-Motion Control by Motion-Image Processing and Harvesting Experiment——

Abstract

With the aim of achieving automation of tomato harvesting, the authors prototyped a tomato-harvesting robot with a vehicle-motion control system that halts the robot in front of red colored tomatoes, and a manipulator-control system that determines a suitable approach route for the robot harvesting hand by analyzing the cluster, and clarify the performance. The results of the experiments indicated the position to the camera centerline was -51-94mm. The results of the harvesting experiments showed the grasping success rate was 81-95%,when at least half of the objective tomato was visible to the camera with 1-4 tomatoes in the cluster. The harvesting success rate was 44-90%. The average execution time for harvesting was 27.6s/fruit.