1985 Volume 47 Issue 2 Pages 177-182
To develop an agricultural robot which travels between crop rows and automatically harvests tomatoes and other fruits, an image input device which sensed the crop vision was constructed and experimented. By the image input device, the picture of fruits was fed from a MOS type color TV camera to a microcomputer. And the three-dimensional location of each fruit was calculated by means of a stereo-camera. Red and ripe tomatoes were used in this experiment as the fruits, and the discrimination between fruits and other materials such as leaves and stems was done by comparing the red-signal and the brightness-signal from the TV camera. The measuring accuracy was fairly good in case the fruit did not overlap each other and was not hidden by leaves and stems. The detected fruit was grasped well by the manipulator which was described in Part 1 of this report.
