Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems
This addresses the labor-intensive task of harvesting sweet peppers for agricultural workers, representing an incremental improvement in robotic harvesting technology.
The paper tackles the problem of autonomously harvesting sweet peppers in protected cropping systems by developing a robotic harvester (Harvey) that combines vision algorithms and a novel end-effector design, achieving success rates of 46% for unmodified crops and 58% for modified crops in field trials.
In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance.