Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems

In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in prot...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE robotics and automation letters Vol. 2; no. 2; pp. 872 - 879
Main Authors Lehnert, Christopher, English, Andrew, McCool, Christopher, Tow, Adam W., Perez, Tristan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.04.2017
Subjects
Agricultural automation
Agriculture
Blades
dexterous manipulation
Grasping
Manipulators
mechanism design of manipulators
Planning
Three-dimensional displays
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ISSN2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI10.1109/LRA.2017.2655622

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Summary:In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance.
ISSN:2377-3766
2377-3766
DOI:10.1109/LRA.2017.2655622