A Berry Picking Robot With A Hybrid Soft-Rigid Arm: Design and Task Space Control

We present a hybrid rigid-soft arm and manipulator for performing tasks requiring dexterity and reach in cluttered environments.Our system combines the benefit of the dexterity of a variable length soft manipulator and the rigid support capability of a hard arm.The hard arm positions the extendable soft manipulator close to the target, and the soft arm manipulator navigates the last few centimeters to reach and grab the target.A novel magnetic sensor and reinforcement learning based control is developed for end effector position control of the robot.A compliant gripper with an IR reflectance sensing system is designed, and a k-nearest neighbor classifier is used to detect target engagement.The system is evaluated in several challenging berry picking scenarios.