1A1-A21 Development of Strawberry Picking Robot : Picking for High Quality Strawberries without a Touch of their Skins

Abstract

Freshness of strawberries can be maintained only for several days. In order to keep the freshness, it is important that strawberries are harvested, without a touch of their skin. In this study, a strawberry picking robot is developed, which is able to achieve mentioned harvest. The robot is composed of three modules of a hand with vision, a manipulator and a vehicle. In the green house where brightness dynamically changes by natural condition of weather, the vision module is possible to stably recognize a feature color as a pattern on the color coordinate system. Therefore the manipulator module can pick a target strawberry accurately. The vehicle module can move to another place when there is no target in its workspace. In maintained cultivation, the developed robot can almost possible for an automatic picking of strawberries. This report describes performance of the strawberry picking robots and consideration of the cultivation conditions for achievement of practical use.