Study of an Autonomous Fruit Picking Robot System in Greenhouses

The objective of this research was to develop an autonomous picking robot system for greenhouse-grown tomatoes, which consists of four major components: the end-effector, machine vision, robot carrier, and control system. The graphical programming language LabVIEW ver. 7.1 was employed to develop the image processing and control system. The experimental results showed the success rates of the integrated picking were 94.83 %, 91.83 %, and 89.63 %, respectively. The average picking time needs about 35.96 s/sample, with a throughput of 100.1 samples/h. Consequently, an autonomous picking robot system was successfully developed and it needs to be further tested for real tomato picking operations in greenhouses in the future.