Development of a Tomato Harvesting Hand with an Opening and Closing Mechanism

Abstract

In recent years, the aging of agricultural workers has become a problem. To solve this problem, we need to introduce robots and machines. This study focuses on harvesting tomatoes, which are often grown in institutions. Crops are easily damaged and the value of the damaged crop is reduced. In addition, the tomatoes are tufted, which increases the possibility of damaging the surrounding tomatoes during harvesting. Therefore, we have developed a harvesting robot hand that has an opening and closing mechanism to wrap and harvest only the target tomato. We confirmed that this developed robot hand is useful by harvesting experiment.