Dual-arm Robot Design and Testing for Harvesting Tomato in Greenhouse

In order to improve the efficiency of robotic harvesting in unstructured environment, a modular concept of dual-arm robot for harvesting tomatoes is proposed in this paper. The objective to develop a modular robotic system which works based on human-robot collaboration is reached. Due to the complexity of working environment, an artificial recognition approach conducted by operator through marking the tomato object on the graphic user interface is used for tomato recognition and localization. A dual-arm frame equipped with two 3 DoF manipulators and two different type end-effectors used to pick tomatoes is designed and tested respectively. The cooperation of two end-effectors could improve the harvesting efficiency significantly. The EtherCAT bus based control and communication system is adopted to increases the reliability and speed of motion control and data communication. Concerning control software, a graphic user interface was designed to exchange the operator’s commands and display the state information of robot. The performances of field test showed the efficiency of the developed robot system, some shortcomings of the robot were also found for future work.