Development of Continuum Robot Arm and Gripper for Harvesting Cherry Tomatoes

Abstract

Designing and development of agricultural robot is always a challenging issue, because of robot intends to work an unstructured environment and at the same time, it should be safe for the surrounded plants. Therefore, traditional robots cannot meet the high demands of modern challenges, such as working in confined and unstructured workspaces. Based on current issues, we developed a new tomato harvesting wire-driven discrete continuum robot arm with a flexible backbone structure for working in confined and extremely constrained spaces. Moreover, we optimized a tomato detaching process by using newly designed gripper with passive stem cutting function. Moreover, by designing the robot we also developed ripe tomato recognition by using machine learning. This paper explains the proposed continuum robot structure, gripper design, and development of tomato recognition system.

Development of a Supervised Robotic Prototype for Citrus Harvesting

“…However, we noticed that the success of this machine, the researcher left the untold solution of how the battery being used by the machine can be recharged while the machine is operating. (Yeshmukhametov et al, 2019), developed a continuum robot arm and gripper for harvesting tomatoes which they named TakoBot for working in confined and extremely constrained spaces. The robot had grippers designed in a semi-spherical shape for grasping spherical objects like tomatoes which require gentle harvesting methods.…”