Recently, farmers of sweet pepper suffer from the increase of its unit production costs due to the rise of labor costs. The rise of unit production costs of sweet pepper, on the other hand, decreases its productivity and causes the lack of its farming expertise, thus resulting in the quality degradation of products. In this regard, it is necessary to introduce an automated robot harvest system into the farming of sweet pepper. In this study, the authors developed an image-based closed-loop control system (a vision servo system) and an automated sweet pepper harvesting robot system and then carried out experiments to verify its efficiency. The working area of the manipulator that detects products through an imaging sensor in the farming environment of sweet pepper, decides whether to harvest it or not, and then informs the location of the product to the control center, which is set up at the distance scope of 350~600 mm from the center of the system and 1000 mm vertically. In order to confirm the performance of the sweet pepper recognition in this study, 269 sweet pepper images were used to extract fruits. Of 269 sweet pepper images, 82.16% were recognized successfully. The harvesting experiment of the system developed in this study was carried out with 100 sweet peppers. The result of experiment with 100 sweet peppers presents the fact that its approach rate to peduncle is about 86.7%, and via four sessions of repetitive harvest experiment it achieves a maximal 70% harvest rate, and its average time of harvest is 51.1 s.

Adjusting the filling pressure is essential to fit the final gas volume when charging a carbonated beverage with high pressure. However, in the previous mechanical carbonated ambient filling system, it was difficult to control and monitor the charging conditions such as pressure, temperature and flow rate. In this study, we have developed a high efficiency carbonated ambient filling system capable of high speed and high pressure filling, by using a pulse type electronic flow-meter. The response speed characteristics of the M(BC) and F(MH) series valves were investigated. LMS Imagine.Lab Amesim (Siemens PLM Software) was used to calculate the charging and discharging time of the system under a high CO2 gas pressure condition. The quantitative and precise charging system was implemented with the change of filling time and monitoring/controlling/correction of flow rate. Moreover, a dual controller of the high-speed pulse output was established and a high-speed data processing/flow rate charging algorithm was applied in the system. The filling variation of the system was in the range of ±3 gram(gr) (standard deviation 0.57). The developed system could be applied to improve the quality of goods and economic feasibility at various industrial sectors.

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