1998 Volume 60 Issue 6 Pages 97-104
The single truss tomato production system is an innovative greenhouse tomato growing system developed to approach a plant factory by effective utilization of lighting, space, and human resources. The system was further modified, by growing the plants in an inverted fashion, to eliminate the need for the labor-intensive plant support task and to facilitate automated cultural practices including harvesting of tomato fruit. In this paper, at first, an introduction of robotics into the inverted single truss tomato production system was discussed. Secondly, a multi-fingered end-effector and a simple two degrees of freedom manipulator were developed and tested. From the experimental results, it was found that it is feasible to introduce the harvesting robot into this production system.
