1P2-W07 Developement of Automatic Harvester for Weak Vegetables and Field Tests(Robotics and Mechatronics in Agriculture)

Abstract

In the present paper, development of an automatic harvester which harvests spinach for eating raw is considered. It is hard challenge to develop the automatic harvester for spinach because those leaves and the stem are soft and easily to get bruises, and so there are not any harvesters which are widely used in the farm. In contrast, a test model of the harvester is developed by our research group and it is shown that automatic harvesting for any types of spinaches is possible even if there is no chine and interrow space in the farm field. In the test model, the root of the spinach is cut by a root-cutting blade which moves in soil, then the root-cut spinach is collected and transferred to the upper position from the ground by conveyors. The effectiveness of the developed harvester was verified by several field tests.