2015 Volume 77 Issue 3 Pages 197-209
We developed a strawberry-packing robot that conveys strawberries mounted on a free-tray, for a large-scale grading system. The robot simultaneously picked a maximum of six strawberries from the trays with six vacuum hands. Each hand held the strawberry by the calyx to avoid damaging the delicate skin. The robot then placed the fruits on a commercialized shipping tray. In functional tests, more than 95% of the fruits were packed with an orientation error of less than ±45°. The standard deviation of the orientation error, however, became larger than the manual operation. The processing time per shipping tray ranged from 45s to 59s. The mishandling rate could be reduced to less than 1% through the field test.
