Development of robotic cabbage harvester (Part 2)

Field test by developed hand

Abstract

A robotic cabbage harvester was developed to mechanize selective harvesting operation. A gripper for picking cabbages which is mounted on the 4 DOF polar coordinate hydraulic drive manipulator has four fingers, two fingers for holding the cabbages, and the others for cutting the stem with blade which is attached to the finger tips. The operation is done by double actions by those fingers, that is, holding cabbage head and cutting stem.
As a result of field experiments, it was obtained that the success rate for picking mature cabbages was 40 to 71% and that 60 to 71% of their stems and leaves were successfully cut. The robot took 32.1s for picking up one cabbage respectively in the continuous operation. In addition, it took 6.5s for initializing and image processing on the average.