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Tendon-Driven Soft Robotic Gripper with Integrated Ripeness Sensing for Blackberry Harvesting by Qiu, Alex; Young, Claire; Gunderman, Anthony; Azizkhani, Milad; Chen, Yue; Hu, Ai-Ping is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Tendon-Driven Soft Robotic Gripper with Integrated Ripeness Sensing for Blackberry Harvesting about?

Growing global demand for food, coupled with continuing labor shortages, motivates the need for automated agricultural harvesting. While some specialty crops (e.g., apples, peaches, blueberries) can be harvested via existing harvesting modalities, fruits such as blackberries and raspberries require delicate handling to mitigate fruit damage that could significantly impact marketability. This motivates the development of soft robotic solutions that enable efficient, delicate harvesting. This paper presents the design, fabrication, and feasibility testing of a tendon-driven soft gripping system focused on blackberries, which are a fragile fruit susceptible to post-harvest damage. The gripper is both low-cost and small form factor, allowing for the integration of a micro-servo for tendon retraction, a near-infrared (NIR) based blackberry ripeness sensor utilizing the reflectance modality for identifying fully ripe blackberries, and an endoscopic camera for visual servoing with a UR-5. The gripper was used to harvest 139 berries with manual positioning in two separate field tests. Field testing found an average retention force of 2.06 N and 6.08 N for ripe and unripe blackberries, resp

Author

Qiu, Alex; Young, Claire; Gunderman, Anthony; Azizkhani, Milad; Chen, Yue; Hu, Ai-Ping

Published

2023

Language

EN