2006 Volume 68 Issue 6 Pages 59-67
The harvesting of strawberry grown on annual hill top is hard because the operation is done with a bended waist on long hour every day. As such its mechanization is constantly being pursued. The successful mechanization of harvesting for strawberry requires advanced capabilities, because the fruits are small and prone to damage. A strawberry harvesting robot equipped with two color cameras (one for positioning and another for picking) was developed. Authors carried on the study of the robot, which can precisely harvest the fruit without damage through cutting and holding the peduncle. The development of the robot and an experiment on recognition of fruit were presented in this paper. Experiment results showed that this robot could detect actual fruits for picking from the image taken by the positioning camera, and move the picking camera to a position whose coordinates were calculated from the image. Thereby the robot was recognized to be able to capture an image of the actual fruits for picking.
