Fruit sorting robot based on color and size for an agricultural product packaging system

Abstract

Indonesia's location in the equator gives an ideal condition for agriculture. However, agriculture suffers the issue of old farming due to a lack of youth interest working in this sector. This problem can be overcome by applying digital farming methods, in which one of them is by employing robots. Robotics technology is suitable for handling the harvested product, such as a sorting robot. This paper presents the application of a 4DOF fruit sorting robot based on color and size in a packaging system. The sorting is made possible by image processing where color is recognized by HSV analysis, and the diameter is known in the grayscale image and setting the thresholding. The fruit to be sorted is red and green tomatoes and red and green grapes. The experiments were conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. The time requires for the robot to accomplish the task is 11.91s for red tomatoes, 11.76s for green tomatoes, 12.56s for red grapes, and 12.92s for green grapes. The time difference is due to the position of the boxes for the sorted fruit. The experimental results show that the arm robot manipulator is applicable for a sorting robot using the proposed method.