Performance Evaluation of a Harvesting Robot for Sweet Pepper

This paper evaluates a robot developed for autonomous harvesting of sweet peppers in a commercial greenhouse. Objectives were to assess robot performance under unmodified and simplified crop conditions, using two types of end effectors (Fin Ray; Lip type), and to evaluate the performance contributio...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of field robotics Vol. 34; no. 6; pp. 1123 - 1139
Main Authors Bac, C. Wouter, Hemming, Jochen, Tuijl, B.A.J., Barth, Ruud, Wais, Ehud, Henten, Eldert J.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.09.2017
Subjects
Agrarische Bedrijfstechnologie
Barriers
Crops
End effectors
Farm Technology
Farm Technology Group
Greenhouses
GTB Teelt & Gewasfysiologie
GTB Tuinbouw Technologie
Harvesting
Leerstoelgroep Agrarische Bedrijfstechnologie
PE&RC
Peppers
Performance evaluation
Picking
Robots
WUR GTB Teelt & Gewasfysiologie
WUR GTB Tuinbouw Technologie
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Summary:This paper evaluates a robot developed for autonomous harvesting of sweet peppers in a commercial greenhouse. Objectives were to assess robot performance under unmodified and simplified crop conditions, using two types of end effectors (Fin Ray; Lip type), and to evaluate the performance contribution of stem‐dependent determination of the grasp pose. We describe and discuss the performance of hardware and software components developed for fruit harvesting in a complex environment that includes lighting variation, occlusions, and densely spaced obstacles. After simplifying the crop, harvest success significantly improved from 6% to 26% (Fin Ray) and from 2% to 33% (Lip type). We observed a decrease in stem damage and an increase in grasp success after enabling stem‐dependent determination of the grasp pose. Generally, the robot had difficulty in successfully picking sweet peppers and we discuss possible causes. The robot's novel capability of perceiving the stem of a plant may serve as useful functionality for future robots.
ISSN:1556-4959
1556-4967
DOI:10.1002/rob.21709