A Human-Robot Cooperative Vehicle for Tea Plucking

A human-robot cooperative vehicle has been developed for tea plucking to solve the problem of the lack of labor in the tea industry. A cooperative framework, instead of a fully autonomous solution, was proposed to leverage human expertise in tea harvesting and power assistance to handle the tea cutting apparatus. The method of side-by-side walking was used to implement the collaboration between the human and robot when carrying a tea cutting apparatus to harvest tea leaves along tea rows. For the experiments, the semiautonomous vehicle was implemented to be lightweight, of compact size, and driven by tracked wheels. The experimental results showed that the human could easily guide the tea plucking machine to harvest tea because the robot shares most of the weight of the machine. The proposed cooperative working robot could be particularly effective in improving the working conditions of farmers during small scale tea harvesting on tea plantations.