In this paper we aim to present an evolution of the development of robotic end effectors with applications in fruit and vegetable harvesting but without exhaustively covering all technical solutions. This study is focused on robotic final effectors dedicated to harvesting fruits that have reached an advanced stage of development for apples, tomatoes, sweet peppers and cucumbers. The performances of these final effectors (harvesting speed, success rate, costs, etc.) are compared with the performances of human operators and we could say that so far the robots fail to reach the efficiency of human operators in the harvesting processes. The success rate is below 90% and the harvest times are longer than 10 seconds and this means a low efficiency. Although the level of commercial robots for fruit harvesting has not been reached, technological developments indicate an improvement in the performance of this category of robots, an increasing number of research projects are focused on tomato and apple harvesting technologies.

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This paper presents a new concept of the robots dedicated to small farming activities. A walking robot is remote controlled in order to perform agricultural operations in small farms or peasant household. The robot should perform all operations during crop development respectively tilling seeding, fertilization, harvesting, etc. The robot structure is conceived in order to achieve low energy consumption criteria by gravitational decupling and static gait. The power of the robot is calculated robot power is calculated by reference to the power of a man or a horse. The purpose of this work is to approach some aspects of a robot according with the requirements of work environments: energy consumption, influence to the environment, the proper locomotion method, etc.