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

Abstract

This review article analyzes state-of-the-art and future perspectives for harvesting robots in high-value crops. The objectives were to characterize the crop environment relevant for robotic harvesting, to perform a literature review on the state-of-the-art of harvesting robots using quantitative measures, and to reflect on the crop environment and literature review to formulate challenges and directions for future research and development. Harvesting robots were reviewed regarding the crop harvested in a production environment, performance indicators, design process techniques used, hardware design decisions, and algorithm characteristics. On average, localization success was 85%, detachment success was 75%, harvest success was 66%, fruit damage was 5%, peduncle damage was 45%, and cycle time was 33 s. A kiwi harvesting robot achieved the shortest cycle time of 1 s. Moreover, the performance of harvesting robots did not improve in the past three decades, and none of these 50 robots was commercialized. Four future challenges with R&D directions were identified to realize a positive trend in performance and to successfully implement harvesting robots in practice: (1) simplifying the task, (2) enhancing the robot, (3) defining requirements and measuring performance, and (4) considering additional requirements for successful implementation. This review article may provide new directions for future automation projects in high-value crops. C 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

State of the art of technology in the food sector value chain towards the IoT

“…http://www.sweeper-robot.eu), because of their limited performances. On average, localization success is 85%, detachment success is 75%, harvest success is 66%, fruit damage is 5%, peduncle damage is 45%, and cycle time is 33 s [11]. Drones, with video-cameras, and Geo-localization systems, like GPS and satellite technologies, help in scanning and monitoring fields.…”

“…Examples of complete tracking from farm to fork can be find in the EU FP7 ICT programme 10 . In Italy the Safety4Food 11 and QRcode Campania 12 projects are still on going. Sharing the food product tracking information about the location of the items and their health status has lead to supply-management integrated systems, where the main business actors of the supply-chain collaborate, helped by ICT and sensors systems, to reduce time and process inefficiencies along the chain and then saving money.…”

Adaptive Image Thresholding of Yellow Peppers for a Harvesting Robot

“…For fruit harvesting robots, one bottleneck is the fruit detection algorithms; Bac et al [8] reported state of the art detection rate being 85% in their 2014 review. Fruit detection is a complex task due to the demanding agricultural environmental conditions.…”

Reactive Path Planning Approach for Docking Robots in Unknown Environment

“…Nowadays autonomous mobile robots such as autonomous drones, autonomous underwater vehicles, and automated vehicles are widely used in the complex environment and undertake the dangerous and heavy tasks [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. However, their durations are constrained by their limited battery capacities and data storage spaces [9].…”