Sensing and End-Effector for a Robotic Tomato Harvester

Fresh produce is important for long-term space missions. It provides valuable nutritionalneeds and psychological boost for mission crews. Labor requirements to grow and harvest the crops,however, must be reduced through automation to allow the crew to perform other tasks. A robotictomato harvester was developed for continuous, selective picking of mature tomatoes. The goal ofthis project was to develop a sensing unit and a robotic hand unit that could be integrated with acommercial robotic manipulator for the automated tomato harvesting task. Image processingalgorithms were developed to determine sizes and locations of mature tomatoes including the onesthat are partially occluded by leaves and/or branches. An end-effector subsystem, including a fourfingerprosthetic hand and an embedded hand controller, was designed and assembled for thetomato picking, holding and placing task. Improvement of a previously designed robotic handresulted in a 50% weight reduction. The sensing and picking capability of the units has beendemonstrated in laboratory and commercial greenhouse environments. Success rates of tomato fruitsensing and picking were better than 95% and 85%, respectively.