Basic Study on Strawberry Harvesting Robot (Part I): — Algorithm for Locating and Feature Extracting of Strawberry Fruits —

Abstract

These papers describe a strawberry harvesting robot where by robot vision and a 4 DOF’s Cartesian coordinate manipulator were used. This first part presents the development of a robot vision system and the algorithm for locating and feature extracting of strawberry fruits. The robot vision system employs the use of two color CCD cameras. The first camera is used to capture the whole area image under focus within the harvesting range, and the second camera captures only the image of the strawberry fruit to be plucked. The algorithm converts the captured images from RGB to L*a*b and extracts recognized position, orientation and shape of strawberry from a gray image of the L*a*b color model. Experimental results show that the robot vision system can extract position, orientation and shape of various strawberries in ordinary lighting condition. The Part II presents the design and development of the robot frame, the plucking hand, 4 DOF’s Cartesian coordinate manipulator and the Control System.