Abstract
One of the challenges in the future of food production, amidst increasing population and decreasing resources, is developing a sustainable food production system. It is anticipated that robotics will play a significant role in maintaining the food production system, specifically in labor-intensive operations. Therefore, the main goal of this project is to develop a robotic fruit harvesting system, initially focused on the harvesting of apples. The robotic harvesting system is composed of a six-degrees-of-freedom (DOF) robotic manipulator, a two-fingered gripper, a color camera, a depth sensor, and a personal computer. This paper details the development and performance of a visual servo system that can be used for fruit harvesting. Initial test evaluations were conducted in an indoor laboratory using plastic fruit and artificial trees. Subsequently, the system was tested outdoors in a commercial fruit orchard. Evaluation parameters included fruit detection performance, response time of the visual servo, and physical time to harvest a fruit. Results of the evaluation showed that the developed visual servo system has the potential to guide the robot for fruit harvesting.
Highlights
Today’s world is dealing with several challenges: the COVID pandemic, population growth, climate change, and decreasing food production
The fixation process brings the target fruit to the center of the camera image, which is the setpoint of the negative feedback system, and readies the robotic system for harvesting
As compared with previous works on fruit harvesting [28,29,30], done indoors with controlled lighting which did not affect the segmentation of the fruit this study shows the response characteristic of visual servoing that is important for a from the background
Summary
Today’s world is dealing with several challenges: the COVID pandemic, population growth, climate change, and decreasing food production. These problems are independent from each other, they have a combined impact. People worried about the reduced availability of food items and either hoarded available items, further compounding the situation, or had to go without. This food insecurity problem was and will continue to be further compounded by population growth. It is reported that in 2050, food production will need to be doubled to feed the world’s population which is estimated to reach 10 billion [2]
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