Watermelon harvesting experiment of a heavy material handling agricultural robot with LQ control

Abstract

For heavy material handling, we first propose an agricultural robot which consists of a 4-DOF underactuated manipulator, a crawler vehicle, and a passive hand in the first step. Then, we discuss the use of LQ control for high speed manipulation. We design a control system based on the characteristics of agricultural operations and the manipulator. The robust stability is analyzed under the structured uncertainty. The robotic harvesting experiment was done in a watermelon field and the effectiveness of LQ control was confirmed.