Abstract
Sweet pepper is one of the major vegetables in Japan with the annual production of almost 150 000t. Kochi prefecture is the third largest producer of the sweet pepper with around 12 000t per year. A sweet pepper automatic harvesting robot is being developed at Kochi University of Technology to help the local farmers with harvesting. Sweet pepper is challenging for automatic harvesting as the localization of the stem of a sweet pepper fruit for cutting is difficult with machine vision. This paper presents preliminary results of a new method for sweet pepper fruit stem detection. The method is using laser range sensor data for fruit orientation calculation and stem position approximation.
