Design and control of the open apple-picking-robot manipulator

According to the apple's growth distribution space and ecological characteristics, we developed a five-DOF articulated robot manipulator (including robot arm and its end-effector), which had redundancy to avoid obstacles and had metamorphic mechanism to reach targets flexibly. The real-time image is acquired from a camera with the installation method of Eye-in-hand and the apple's position will be located after the processing of the host computer. The result of experiments shows that the measure error is basically within ± 1.5cm when the measure distance ranges from 0.10 m to 2.10 m in the workspace. The test shows that the system runs smoothly and reliably. The success ratio of picking is 86% and the average time consumed is 14.3 s.