Field Operation of a Movable Strawberry-harvesting Robot using a Travel Platform

This paper describes the development of a movable strawberry-harvesting robot that can be mounted on a travel platform, along with its practical operation in a greenhouse. The harvesting robot can traverse and enter an adjacent path and picking is performed with the travel platform halted on the travel path. Machine vision is used to detect a piece of red fruit and calculate its position in the three-dimensional space, whereupon its maturity level is assessed according to an area ratio determined by classifying the whole fruit into three areas: ripe, intermediate, and unripe area fractions. Sufficiently mature fruit are picked by the end-effector by cutting the peduncle. During operational tests in a greenhouse, our machine vision algorithm to assess maturity level showed a coefficient of determination of 0.84. Setting the maturity level parameter at 70 or 80% resulted in higher shippable fruit rates than the setting of 60%, because small unripe fruit positioned in front of larger ripe fruit were successfully skipped in the former case. Our results showed that a higher shippable fruit rate could be achieved later in the harvest season, reaching 97.3% in the test in June. The successful harvesting rate and work efficiency were 54.9% and 102.5 m h(-1), respectively.