Development of autonomous tracking and carrying functions for harvest support robots

Abstract

Along with an aging society and a shortage of workers, supporting workers for harvesting fruit is strongly required. Harvesting fruit is carried out by using shoulder baskets, and when the baskets are full, they are transported to a shipping site. In this paper, we propose a harvest support robot that combines the ability to automatically follow workers and the ability to autonomously move to shipping sites. The robot can track the workers in an appropriate position depending on the worker's behaviors. Improving the accuracy of localization for autonomous navigation in uneven ground the LiDAR data is filtered by the robot’s orientation. We evaluated the effectiveness of the proposed system in an actual uneven terrain.