A cherry-tomato harvesting robot

Abstract

The harvesting robot is a robot that is created for harvesting cherry tomatoes in households and greenhouses. For households, the project aims to protect the privacy of people who have their own gardens at home, and do not prefer to have workers coming to their home gardens to harvest the fruits. In addition, the weather in Kuwait is very hot, which makes it difficult for harvesters to work for long periods of time. This creates a problem because if the gardener does not finish harvesting on time; the fruits become rotten causing wastage and loss. Therefore, using a harvesting robot provides an excellent solution for harvesting in such conditions. The developed robot picks out the cherry tomatoes that are ripe enough without causing any damage to the surroundings, and leaves the ones that are not ripe enough. Moreover, the robot identifies the ripe cherry tomatoes by image sensing using a camera. After that, the robot picks the ripe cherry tomato and places it in a basket. The robot repeats the previous steps until there are no cherry tomatoes left on the trees. The robot has additional features, such as picking the rotten cherry tomatoes and placing them in a separate basket. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of this harvesting robot.