End-Effectors Developed for Citrus and Other Spherical Crops

Citrus harvesting is time-intensive and labor-intensive, relying mainly on manual harvesting. The automatic harvesting of fruit and vegetable crops can not only reduce the physical labor of fruit farmers in the harsh field environment but also greatly improve the harvesting efficiency. Based on the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences 2022-08, Vol.12 (15), p.7945
Main Authors: Xiao, Xu, Wang, Yaonan, Jiang, Yiming
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adaptability
citrus
Citrus fruits
Crops
End effectors
end-effector
Fruits
Grasping
Hands
Harvest
Harvesting
Labor
Machine vision
Picking
picking trials
Process parameters
robotic harvesting
Robots
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Summary:Citrus harvesting is time-intensive and labor-intensive, relying mainly on manual harvesting. The automatic harvesting of fruit and vegetable crops can not only reduce the physical labor of fruit farmers in the harsh field environment but also greatly improve the harvesting efficiency. Based on the principle of manual citrus picking, an end-effector with three-finger grasping is designed in this study. First, the structure of the end-effector was designed to achieve the function of stable grasping and effective cutting of citrus fruits, and then the working process and key parameters of the end-effector were explained in detail. Finally, a picking test was conducted without considering robot vision. The test results show that the end-effector has a picking success rate of 95.23% for citrus with a diameter of 30–100 mm and an average picking time of 4.65 s for a single fruit. This end-effector can realize the picking function for citrus of different sizes and shapes and has the advantages of high adaptability, stable gripping and no damage to the fruit.
ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app12157945