Field Operation of a Movable Strawberry-harvesting Robot using a Travel Platform

Japan Agricultural Research Quarterly
ISSN 00213551
NII recode ID (NCID) AA0068709X
Full text
48-03-07.pdf241.85 KB

This paper describes the development of a movable strawberry-harvesting robot that can be mounted on a travel platform, along with its practical operation in a greenhouse. The harvesting robot can traverse and enter an adjacent path and picking is performed with the travel platform halted on the travel path. Machine vision is used to detect a piece of red fruit and calculate its position in the three-dimensional space, whereupon its maturity level is assessed according to an area ratio determined by classifying the whole fruit into three areas: ripe, intermediate, and unripe area fractions. Sufficiently mature fruit are picked by the end-effector by cutting the peduncle. During operational tests in a greenhouse, our machine vision algorithm to assess maturity level showed a coefficient of determination of 0.84. Setting the maturity level parameter at 70 or 80% resulted in higher shippable fruit rates than the setting of 60%, because small unripe fruit positioned in front of larger ripe fruit were successfully skipped in the former case. Our results showed that a higher shippable fruit rate could be achieved later in the harvest season, reaching 97.3% in the test in June. The successful harvesting rate and work efficiency were 54.9% and 102.5 m h-1, respectively.

Date of issued
Creator HAYASHI Shigehiko YAMAMOTO Satoshi SAITO Sadafumi OCHIAI Yoshiji KAMATA Junzo KURITA Mitsutaka YAMAMOTO Kazuhiro
Subject

shippable fruit rate

successful harvesting rate

traverse function

work efficiency

Publisher Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences
Available Online
NII resource type vocabulary Journal Article
Volume 48
Issue 3
spage 307
epage 316
DOI 10.6090/jarq.48.307
Rights Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences
Language eng

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