Robotic Harvesting Technology for Fruit Vegetables in Protected
Horticultural Production
In large-scale greenhouse production, technological developments can reduce
production costs; mechanization of crop maintenance and harvesting is one
desirable way to accomplish this. In this context, we have developed three types of
harvesting robot. Our prototype strawberry-harvesting robot could judge maturity
and make basic harvesting movements. Our eggplant-harvesting robot achieved a
harvesting rate of 29.1%, averaging 43.2 seconds per fruit. The stereoscopic vision
system of our tomato-harvesting robot could detect individual fruit, and detected the
closest ripened tomato with an accuracy of approximately 85%.