Development of a Tomato Harvesting Robot for Farm Field

Abstract

The 9th Tomato Harvesting Robot Competition was held at the green house in Kitakyushu Science and Research Park. The competition consisted of two leagues for different field areas: rail-style for greenhouses and free-style for open fields. Our team competed in the free-style league. Participation in the free-style category required the following: tomato harvesting mechanism; mobility mechanism to move on the rough terrain; camera to photograph tomato; and self-location system. We developed a 3-axis cartesian coordinates manipulator tomato harvesting robot using crawler to move on soil and using suction and cutting to harvest the tomatoes. In this paper, we described the system architecture of tomato harvesting robot and the results of 9th Tomato Harvesting Robot Competition in 2022.