Tomato Harvesting Arm Robot Manipulator; a Pilot Project

Abstract

Promoting digital farming might be the answer for current challenges in the agriculture industry by employing a robot to provide continuous information of its deployed area and gives the right analysis in many aspects of farming. This paper discusses the pilot project of employing robot as a harvesting robot. The fruit to be picked is red and green tomatoes. The objective of this study is to set the initial project in creating a series of robots applied in agricultural to realize the idea of digital farming. The novelty of this study is that this method is simple, and image processing is kept simple to accommodate processors limited computation resources. The robot designed is customized according to the size of the tomato tree and tomato. The tomato location is indicated by a circle resulted from the image processing and divided into left, right, and middle position in the image plane. The image plane resolution in this study is 320 × 180 pixels. If x = 15 pixels and y = 42 pixels, then the output angle of servo motor on the based is 1150, servo motor joint1 is 900, and servo motor joint2 is 1000. The arm robot moves to the left and harvests the tomato. The average time for harvesting red tomato is 4.932 s, and green tomato is 5.276 s. The required time for the robot from detecting red tomato and return to standby position is 9.676 s, and 10.586 s for the green tomatoes. This time difference is due to robot distance to tomato and not the color of the tomato. The experiment shows that the robot successfully harvests the tomatoes in the setting given in this study, and proves the effectiveness of this robot design as an agriculture robot.