Development of an Agricultural Robot for Strawberry Fruit Harvesting and Truss Pruning

This paper describes an agricultural robot for strawberry fruit harvesting and truss pruning. Although various agricultural robots were studied, most of them had single-function. The target fields for these were also a well-maintained environment in which they are relatively easy to introduce the agricultural robots, such as a plant factory. The field in which the developed robot in this study operates is a small-scale greenhouse, and this robot is a multifunctional rather than a single-function agricultural robot. This robot consists of the following: a crawler-type moving mechanism, a manipulator with 6 degrees of freedom, an end-effector capable of cutting and gripping, and an RGBD camera. In addition, to realize the functions of harvesting and pruning, a method of recognizing strawberry plants and detecting cutting points for both harvesting and pruning is implemented. Harvesting and pruning experiments was conducted at a strawberry greenhouse. This paper reports the results. For the results of the harvesting experiment, the harvesting time per fruit was approximately 20 seconds, and the success rate was 80%. For the results of the pruning experiment, the pruning time per truss was approximately 23 seconds, and the success rate was 80%. These experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the multifunctional agricultural robots.