Design, Development, Integration, and Field Evaluation of a Ridge-Planting Strawberry Harvesting Robot

Yang Yu, Hehe Xie, Kailiang Zhang (), Yujie Wang, Yutong Li, Jianmei Zhou and Lizhang Xu
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Yang Yu: College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
Hehe Xie: College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
Kailiang Zhang: College of Engineering, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
Yujie Wang: School of Electrical and Information Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Yutong Li: College of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Jianmei Zhou: College of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China
Lizhang Xu: College of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-13

Abstract: Due to the complex unstructured environmental factors in ridge-planting strawberry cultivation, automated harvesting remains a significant challenge. This paper presents an oriented-ridge double-arm cooperative harvesting robot designed for this cultivation. The robot is equipped with a novel non-destructive harvesting end-effector and two self-developed specialized manipulators, integrated with the strawberry picking point visual perception system based on the lightweight Mask R-CNN and a CAN bus-based machine control system. The greenhouse harvesting experiments show that the robot achieved an average harvesting success rate of 49.30% in natural environments after flower and fruit thinning, while only a 30.23% success rate was achieved in untrimmed natural environments. This indicates that the agronomic practice of flower and fruit thinning can significantly simplify the automated harvesting environment and improve harvesting performance. Automated harvesting efficiency test results show that the single-arm average harvesting speed is 7 s per fruit, while double-arm cooperative harvesting can achieve 4 s per fruit. Future expansion by increasing the number of robotic arms could significantly improve harvesting efficiency. However, the study conducted for this paper was poor for those strawberries whose body or stem was severely blocked, which should be further improved upon in follow-up studies.

Keywords: harvesting robot; visual perception; picking point; non-structural environment; field evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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