White asparagus harvesting is a highly repetitive and labor intensive task that is typically done manually at present. In the past decades, robotics has been increasingly adopted in agriculture to improve productivity and efficiency. This paper presents a prototype of an automatic robot to harvest the delicate white asparagus automatically. The mechanical design of the robot is developed cost effectively and suitable for the application in white asparagus field. Differently from the harvesting robot driven using caterpillars, the platform of our harvesting machine has a differential drive system with two independent drive wheels at the front, which improves the maneuvering flexibility of the robot movement. Two casters are established at the rear to provide balance. A black/white camera is used to identify the white asparagus tips. The position information of the tips is used for the harvesting manipulator to locate the harvesting device, which is composed of a holder and a gripper integrated with a special cutter. The harvesting device fulfills the task to cut off the white asparagus spear 25 cm deep under the ground and pull out the cutoff spear. Both the gripper and the cutter are driven electrically, which enables the system to be operated with high precision and flexibility. The preliminary experimental tests of the developed row guidance system demonstrate a satisfactory tracking accuracy. The performance of the vision-based harvesting system is validated by experiments in the field. The robotic harvesting device succeeds in harvesting 4 spears per minute. The qualified ratio of the product is 85%.
Design of a prototype of an automatic robot for white asparagus harvesting
2011
8 Seiten, 6 Bilder, 19 Quellen
(nicht paginiert)
Conference paper
English
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