End-Effectors for Harvesting Manipulators - State Of The Art Review

Abstract

There has been an increase in the variety of harvesting manipulators. However, sometimes the lack of efficiency of these manipulators makes it difficult to compete with harvesting tasks performed by humans. One of the key components of these manipulators is the end-effector, responsible for picking the fruits from the plant. This paper studies different types of end-effectors used by some harvesting manipulators and compares them. The objective is to analyse their advantages and limitations to better understand the requirements to design an end-effector to improve the performance of a custom Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) on the harvest of different types of fruits.