Development of Loose Fruit Collector System for Palm Oil

The collection of loose fruits is essential to plantation companies as the majority of profits come from collecting loose fruits scattered around the trees due to the major percentage of the palm oil is extracted from the loose fruits. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the latest loose fruit collection method used by plantation companies, in order to design an autonomous loose fruit collection system solution. Apart from that, we need to develop C programming source code that is integrated between the ROS programming code of the autonomous robot and the loose fruit collector robot and to test and verify the performance of the autonomous robot in real life palm oil plantations. As an overview, the proposed autononomous loose fruit collection system is divided into four stages which are the roller, vacuum, and separation stages which represents how the system collects the loose fruit. The collection stage focuses on collecting the loose fruits that are scattered across the ground by utilising linear motor receiving feedback data from IR sensors. The vacuum stage is used to temporarily to store the collected fruits into a storage bin by using drone’s motor as a suction mechanism. The separation stage uses a separation drum custom made to separate the loose fruits from any attached debris. The performance efficiency of the collection system is determined by the amount of loose fruits collected and the percentage of trash, debris and unwanted materials that is collected along with the loose fruits.