Design and Development of the Pineapple Harvesting Robotic Gripper

Abstract

Applications of robot in various fields like industrial automation, mining, space application, medical science, and agriculture application have been increased with recent need and technological development. Recently, various researches reported the development of agricultural robot with suitable gripper for particular applications, like tomato harvesting, strawberry harvesting, apple harvesting, cherry harvesting, eggplant harvesting, cabbage harvesting, cucumber harvesting, and crop cutting. A lot of scope still is there to improve agriculture root. Development of the robot component with 3D printing increased due to first production capability, complex shape can be manufactured very easily. Recently, fused deposition modeling method is widely used for 3D printing to manufacture complicated parts of robot to develop working model. It has been found polylactic acid printing material with controlled printing condition that provides good strength of the printed parts. The Arduino UNO-based controller for actuation of the robotic system has become popular due to low cost, less energy requirement, and its simplicity. The northeastern region of India cultivates a lot of pineapples. Pineapple cultivation increased rapidly last two decades. The regions are mainly covered by hills, so the access of pineapple field by human has difficulty. The pineapple leaves are also very rough, which may cause human injury. Development of the robot for pineapple cropping can improve productivity and human comfort. Special type of gripper design has to be done for pineapple cropping application. In the present study, three fingers gripper cum cutter has been developed for pineapple harvesting application. Model of the gripper has been developed in CREO software based on the dimensional survey of the pineapple. Mechanical analysis of the 3D printed gripper components has been done to obtain final design of the gripper component. The gripper component has been manufactured through FDM 3D printing. Finally, the 3D printed gripper components have been assembled to develop working model. The Arduino UNO and Bluetooth module are integrated with servo motors for controlling the finger components, cutter arm, and cutter rotor.