A Study of Fruit Reachability in Orchard Trees by Linear-Only Motion

Robotic fruit harvesters typically utilize multiple-degree-of-freedom arms, often kinematically redundant. The hypothesis is that as branches constrain fruit reachability, redundancy is necessary to navigate through branches and reach fruits inside the canopy. Modern commercial orchards increasingly adopt trees of SNAP architectures (Simple, Narrow, Accessible, and Productive). This paper presents a simulation study on linear fruit reachability (LFR) on high-density, trellised pear trees; linear only motion was used to reach the fruits. Results based on digitized geometric tree models and fruit locations showed that 91.1% of the fruits were reachable after three “harvesting passes” with proper approach angles.