1996 Volume 58 Issue Supplement Pages 467-470
Generally speaking, tomato plant is usually grown until 5th or 6th truss of fruit at least in Japan. However, high density single truss tomato system have been reported recently due to several advantages as followings; 1. tomato plant including seedling, truss, fruit, leaf and stem can be standardized. 2. uniform quality and quantity are expected. 3. production scheduling is easy and demand of labor is predictable. 4. transportable bench is easy to be used and efficient greenhouse space utilization can be done. 5. mechanization is relatively easy.
In addition, tomato plant was grown upside down on the tomato production system in this study because of much less labor for plant training and easy mechanical operation. When a robot is introduced to this production system, no traveling device is required and the robot can work in the ideal environmental condition, since transportable bench is used. The robot, therefore, mailnly consist of manipulator, end-effector and visual sensor. The manipulator will be a cartesian coordinate type whose operational space is adaptable to the bench. To the end of manipulator, an end-effector which can suck a target fruit by suction pad and can grip and pick fruit off by fingers will be attached. As for visual sensor, a color TV camera can discriminate matured fruits from the others and can determine the fruit positions. While the robotic components are developing, appropriate variety of tomato plant is being investigated for robotic havesting.
