2003 Volume 65 Issue 4 Pages 108-116
This paper presents a structure system of a heavy material handling manipulator for agricultural robots as the 1st step. Firstly, as the manipulator for handling the heavy materials is analyzed using kinematics indexes, the parallel type manipulator is superior to the conventional manipulators such as polar coordinates type, articulated type, cylindrical coordinates type, cartesian coordinates type and SCARA type. Secondly, a prototype of the parallel type manipulator has been designed and developed for watermelon harvesting using a hydraulic motor, hydraulic cylinders and a DC motor. Finally, the robotic harvesting experiment was done using the developed manipulator in a watermelon field. In this experiment, the success rate was 86.7% and the working time was 40s. For the standard watermelons, the success rate was 100%.
