A portable light weight system for saffron harvesting

Abstract

The system described here is conceived as a shoulder portable device for saffron flowers detaching and collecting. The system is a portable light machine, carried by the human operator on his back during the harvesting phase of the saffron production. The main parts of the system are two: the first one is a gripper designed to detach the flower containing three stigmas, which are the costly final product; the second one is aimed to collect the detached flower through a vacuum collector. In this paper, the operating principles of detaching and collecting devices are described: a model of the gripper is written and compared to the experimental laboratory tests. The model is also used to investigate the system operating principle sensitivity to the variation of some physical characteristics of the gripper. Experimental tests on field are also described to know on field performances of the system.