Fruit Picking Robots

Rough sketch of fruit picker robot using Microsoft Paint            

Have you seen large fruits garden with lots of fruits. For a fruit gardener, it is extremely important to harvest fruit in time. In a large garden there is need of many people to select which fruit is ripen enough to pick out and which doesn't?


It is time consuming process and if not done in time would cause wastage and money loss. This project idea is about fruit picking robot which not only work as a fruit picker but smart enough to pick only those fruits which are ripen enough.

Level: Difficult

Challenges:

Fruit picking is more complicated than it appears. It is extremely difficult for robot to pick correct fruit without causing any damage to the surrounding.It involves many concepts and technologies to complete this task effectively.

Robot should have following capabilities for fruit picking to work:

1.  Image Sensing
2.  Reach to every part of tree
3. Movable Platform
4. All data about surrounding
5. Box to put all fruits

How to build one?

Even though I have discussed most of the above concepts in this blog at separate posts but this project needs to use all of them at once.

Image Sensing:  Our Robot needs to sense the environment and takes decision accordingly. It is very important because without it we can’t find out exact location of fruit as well as whether it is ripped or not.

Reach to every part: To maximize reach of our robot, we would build many flexible arms on each side of it. Arms of our robot would be flexible enough they not only pick fruit from anywhere on the tree, but they would not cause any harm to surrounding objects. Technically we need more degree of freedom with our arm. Some Stanford students achieved it using Visibility Graph Search and Inverse Kinematics .Details of their project is available here. http://ai.stanford.edu/~mitul/btp.html
Related Post on this blog:
Robotic Arm with Gripper

Movable Platform: Platform of our machine should have capability to revolve 360 degree, without it we would not able to gather information about the surrounding. To build your platform, you would need Motor drivers, Navigation system, Motion planner, and Robot Controller

Box: It is a place where robot would put its fruit after picking them. It would be at the top of the machine.
 All data about surrounding: Data interpretation about the surrounding is important because without it we would not able to move forward in correct path. You would get details about path finding in following links:
Vehicle pathplanning in three dimensions using optics
Autonomous Pathfinding

Related Video :


Related Projects:
Robotics