Engineering and Horticultural Aspects of Robotic Fruit Harvesting: Opportunities and Constraints

Abstract

<jats:p>Automated solutions for fresh market fruit and vegetable harvesting have been studied by numerous researchers around the world during the past several decades. However, very few developments have been adopted and put into practice. The reasons for this lack of success are due to technical, economic, horticultural, and producer acceptance issues. The solutions to agricultural robotic mechanization problems are multidisciplinary in nature. Although there have been significant technology advances during the past decade, many scientific challenges remain. Viable solutions will require engineers and horticultural scientists who understand crop-specific biological systems and production practices, as well as the machinery, robotics, and controls issues associated with the automated production systems. Focused multidisciplinary teams are needed to address the full range of commodity-specific technical issues involved. Although there will be common technology components, such as machine vision, robotic manipula-tion, vehicle guidance, and so on, each application will be specialized, due to the unique nature of the biological system. Collaboration and technology sharing between commodity groups offers the benefit of leveraged research and development dollars and reduced overall development time for multiple commodities. This paper presents an overview of the major horticultural and engineering aspects of robotic mechanization for horticultural crop harvesting systems.</jats:p>

Harvesting Robots for High‐value Crops: State‐of‐the‐art Review and Challenges Ahead

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Design, integration, and field evaluation of a robotic apple harvester

“…A significant bottleneck to commercial development is the extensive variability that exists in the unstructured agricultural environment. Because the challenges of robotic harvesting have been well‐documented in several reviews of complete systems, the literature review included here is brief and tailored to a discussion of issues that have limited the performance of robotic apple harvesters.…”

Autonomous Technologies in Agricultural Equipment: A Review of the State of the Art

“…The productivity of agricultural machines is expected to improve with automation due to increased efficiency, reliability, precision, and reduced need for human mediation (Burks et al, 2005;Schueller, 2014). Nevertheless, the progress of automation and robotics in agriculture has been slow compared to progress in industrial manufacture, in which well-defined, pre-determined, repetitive tasks are performed in relatively static environments (Hague and Tillett, 1996;Bechar andVigneault, 2016, 2017).…”