Dual Robot Coordination for Apple Harvesting

Davidson, Joseph R.; Hohimer, Cameron J.; Mo, Changki; Karkee, Manoj

doi:10.13031/aim.201700567

Cited by 31 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…Setiawan et al (2004) designed a low‐cost gripper and Kahya and Arin (2019) developed a pneumatic cutting tool to cut stems of apples. Davidson et al (2016, 2017) and Onishi et al (2019) used a three‐fingered gripper that encases the apple. For such a three‐fingered gripper J. Li et al (2016) tested the influence of different picking patterns on the detachment process of an apple during robotic harvesting.…”

Section: Harvestingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Some robotic apple harvesters were developed in research environments. Ceres et al (1998), Davidson et al (2016, 2017), and Onishi et al (2019) engineered and tested their concepts under controlled lab circumstances. Baeten et al (2008) and Silwal et al (2017) developed a picking robot for apples as well and validated its functionalities in field experiments.…”

Section: Harvestingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, several research projects were dedicated to develop proper grippers for picking pome fruit Setiawan et al (2004). designed a low-cost gripper andKahya and Arin (2019) developed a pneumatic cutting tool to cut stems of apples Davidson et al (2016Davidson et al ( , 2017. andOnishi et al (2019) used a three-fingered gripper that encases the apple.…”

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confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Automation and robotics in the cultivation of pome fruit: Where do we stand today?

Verbiest

Ruysen²,

Vanwalleghem³

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

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The cultivation of apples and pears in orchards consists of several tasks that still demand much human labor. The cost of this skilled labor increases while the number of competent seasonal workers becomes insufficient. These facts are a threat to the fruit industry. To find a solution, this paper addresses current as well as future automation possibilities for the main orchard tasks as a profitable alternative to human labor. Besides an activity research in pome fruit orchards, this paper contains an overall review of the research and developments that have been performed to automate each major activity (e.g., pruning, thinning, spraying, harvesting and mobile navigating) in the cultivation of pome fruit. These tasks are individually evaluated on feasibility and profitability of the developed automations. Finally, this paper concludes that, despite the large amount of research, almost no fully automated and cost-efficient solution has been developed. A possible option to increase the viability of the prototypes might be the simplification of the tree structures, and consequently the orchard architecture, to make it "robot-ready." Another option in this perspective is combining several techniques, for accomplishing individual tasks, in one multipurpose robot platform. As a result, the usability and efficiency of the robot increases.

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Section: Harvestingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Harvestingmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Automation and robotics in the cultivation of pome fruit: Where do we stand today?

Verbiest

Ruysen²,

Vanwalleghem³

et al. 2020

Journal of Field Robotics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Theoretical and applied research on robotic harvesting of fruits and vegetable are huge. Figure 5 shows some of the efforts that resulted in building actual robotic harvesting platforms, including (a) Harvey [28] : an autonomous mobile robot platform with UR5 manipulator for harvesting sweet peppers grown in greenhouses and other protect cultivation systems, (b) the CROPS harvesting platform for sweet pepper [27,171] , (c) the SWEEPER platform (developed by the Sweeper EU H2020 project consortium, www.sweeper-robot.eu) with a Fanuc LRMate 200iD robot manipulator (Fanuc America Corporation, Rochester Hills, MI) and a custom-built gripper and catching mechanism for sweet pepper harvesting, (d) the Energid robotic citrus picking system (Bedford, MA), (e) the citrus harvesting robot [48,49,155] developed at the University of Florida which uses a custom built gripper mounted on the Robotics Research manipulator model 1207 (Cincinnati, Ohio), (f) the DogTooth strawberry robot (Great Shelford, Cambridge, UK), (g) the Shibuya Seiki robot that can harvest strawberry fruits every 8 seconds, (h) a tomato harvesting robot from Suzhou Botian Automation Technology Co., Ltd (Jiangsu, Suzhou, China), (i) a cucumber harvesting robot developed at the Wageningen University and Research Center [35,38] , (j) an apple harvesting robot [172] with custom built manipulator mounted on top of a modified crawler mobile robot, (k) one of the first manipulators developed for the CROPS project [171] and modified for apple harvesting, (l) a linear actuator robotic system for apple picking developed by ffrobotics (Gesher HaEts 12, Israel), (m) a vacuum mechanism robot for apple picking from AbundantRobotics (Hayward, CA, USA), (n) the UR5 manipulator with a soft robotic universal gripper for apple harvesting developed at the University of Sydney, and, (n) an apple catching prototype robot [173][174][175] developed at the Wachington State University. Most of these projects have used eye-in-hand look-and-move configuration in their visual servo control.…”

Section: Harvesting Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this approach, even if the fruit localization is accurate, and the robot control calculates an optimum trajectory to reach the fruit without receiving additional sensing feedback from the camera, the moment it enters into the dense plant canopy it disrupts the exact location of the target fruit. a. Harvey [28] b. CROPS [27,171] c. SWEEPER d. Energid citrus picking system e. Citrus robot [48,49,155] [35,38] j. Apple harvesting robot [172] www.dogtooth.tech shibuya-sss.co.jp szbotian.com.cn Wageningen UR k. Apple harvesting [178] l. Apple picker m. Apple picking vacuum n. UR5 apple robot o. Apple catching [173][174][175]…”

Section: Harvesting Robotsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Research and development in agricultural robotics: A perspective of digital farming

Shamshiri¹,

Weltzien²,

Hameed³

et al. 2018

International Journal of Agricultural and Biological Engineering

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Digital farming is the practice of modern technologies such as sensors, robotics, and data analysis for shifting from tedious operations to continuously automated processes. This paper reviews some of the latest achievements in agricultural robotics, specifically those that are used for autonomous weed control, field scouting, and harvesting. Object identification, task planning algorithms, digitalization and optimization of sensors are highlighted as some of the facing challenges in the context of digital farming. The concepts of multi-robots, human-robot collaboration, and environment reconstruction from aerial images and ground-based sensors for the creation of virtual farms were highlighted as some of the gateways of digital farming. It was shown that one of the trends and research focuses in agricultural field robotics is towards building a swarm of small scale robots and drones that collaborate together to optimize farming inputs and reveal denied or concealed information. For the case of robotic harvesting, an autonomous framework with several simple axis manipulators can be faster and more efficient than the currently adapted professional expensive manipulators. While robots are becoming the inseparable parts of the modern farms, our conclusion is that it is not realistic to expect an entirely automated farming system in the future.

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Modular autonomous strawberry picking robotic system

Parsa

Debnath

Khan

et al. 2023

Journal of Field Robotics

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Challenges in strawberry picking made selective harvesting robotic technology very demanding. However, the selective harvesting of strawberries is a complicated robotic task forming a few scientific research questions. Most available solutions only deal with a specific picking scenario, for example, picking only a single variety of fruit in isolation. Nonetheless, most economically viable (e.g., high‐yielding and/or disease‐resistant) varieties of strawberry are grown in dense clusters. The current perception technology in such use cases is inefficient. In this work, we developed a novel system capable of harvesting strawberries with several unique features. These features allow the system to deal with very complex picking scenarios, for example, dense clusters. Our concept of a modular system makes our system reconfigurable to adapt to different picking scenarios. We designed, manufactured, and tested a patented picking head with 2.5‐degrees of freedom (two independent mechanisms and one dependent cutting system) capable of removing possible occlusions and harvesting the targeted strawberry without any contact with the fruit flesh to avoid damage and bruising. In addition, we developed a novel perception system to localize strawberries and detect their key points, picking points, and determine their ripeness. For this purpose, we introduced two new data sets. Finally, we tested the system in a commercial strawberry growing field and our research farm with three different strawberry varieties. The results show the effectiveness and reliability of the proposed system. The designed picking head was able to remove occlusions and harvest strawberries effectively. The perception system was able to detect and determine the ripeness of strawberries with 95% accuracy. In total, the system was able to harvest 87% of all detected strawberries with a success rate of 83% for all pluckable fruits. We also discuss a series of open research questions in the discussion section.

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Dual Robot Coordination for Apple Harvesting

Cited by 31 publications

References 5 publications

Automation and robotics in the cultivation of pome fruit: Where do we stand today?

Automation and robotics in the cultivation of pome fruit: Where do we stand today?

Research and development in agricultural robotics: A perspective of digital farming

Modular autonomous strawberry picking robotic system

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