Methods of Detecting Fruit by Visual Sensor Attached to Manipulator

Fruit Detecting Experiment and Simulation by Computer

Abstract

A simple and cheap color camera, which could recognize various kinds of fruits, was made and used as a visual sensor in order to develop a fruit harvesting robot. This camera was attached to a manipulator of the robot and able to recognize and detect a fruit with the access motion of the manipulator to the fruit, even if the fruit was so far from the camera and picture element number was so small.
In this paper, two methods of detecting the position of fruit by use of the motion of the manipulator of which the camera was attached to near its hand, were investigated by an experiment and a computer simulation.