Development of Harvesting Robot for Tomato Robot Competition 2022 and Its Evaluation

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the most important industries for human food production.Recently, the number of farmers in Japan is decreasing, and the age of farmers is increasing.Therefore, the automation of agriculture using robot systems is highly required.The "Tomato Robot Competition" is held every year in Fukuoka, Japan, to arouse students' interest in the field of agriculture, and to promote the development of agricultural automation technology by robot systems.In this paper, we introduce the developed tomato harvesting robot to participate in the "Tomato Robot Competition 2022", and its harvesting performance evaluation.The developed tomato harvesting robot consists of 3 linear arms, an end-effector, a rail movement system, and an electronic system of communication and control.In the evaluation, the developed tomato harvesting robot took approximately 1.1 [min] to harvest a single tomato.