Design of a Robotic Pneumatic Pruner for Robotic Apple Harvesting

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 11 - 17, 10.10.2019

Erhan Kahya , Selçuk Arın

Abstract

The robotic systems firstly developed in
industrial production domain. But, in countries, in which the number of
agricultural workers is limited and the costs are high, there is a tendency
towards robotic technology in agricultural production. For this reason, the
robotic system implementations started to seem in many agricultural activities.
In the present study, the robotic system was discussed in terms of harvesting
that is one of the agricultural activities. The robotic harvesting system
consists of image processor, robotic arm, and gripper, which performs the final
action. In this study, the position of fruit was determined in real-time by
using the image processing. The X- and Y-coordinates sent to robotic arm
directed the movement of it. Z-axis, which is the third axis and provides the
forwards movement, was controlled using distance sensor. The designed pneumatic
pruner system was mounted at the tip of robotic arm. The experiments were
carried out on 100 Golden apples at different locations on the branch. Based on
the coordinates of fruit, 85% positioning accuracy and 73% success rate were
obtained in cutting the fruit from branch. The cutting success was
statistically analyzed. At the end of study, the position of fruit stem
corresponding to the tip of pruner, the position of pruner corresponding to the
body of fruit, the fruit, or the beginning of stem rather than the stem itself,
and the position of pruner on the shoot of stem were observed to cause failure
during cutting procedure. According to the results obtained from experiments,
it was concluded that the system to be used in such systems is the pneumatic
pruner system.

Keywords

robotic, harvesting

References

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