Design and Evaluation of a Novel Cable-Driven Gripper with Perception Capabilities for Strawberry Picking Robots

Ya Xiong, Pal Johan From, Volkan Isler

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

46 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents a novel cable-driven gripper with perception capabilities for autonomous harvesting of strawberries. Experiments show that the gripper allows for more accurate and faster picking of strawberries compared to existing systems. The gripper consists of four functional parts for sensing, picking, transmission, and storing. It has six fingers that open to form a closed space to swallow a target strawberry and push other surrounding berries away from the target. Equipped with three IR sensors, the gripper controls a manipulator arm to correct for positional error, and can thus pick strawberries that are not exactly localized by the vision algorithm, improving the robustness. Experiments show that the gripper is gentle on the berries as it merely cuts the stem and there is no physical interaction with the berries during the cutting process. We show that the gripper has close-to-perfect successful picking rate when addressing isolated strawberries. By including internal perception, we get high positional error tolerance, and avoid using slow, high-level closed-loop control. Moreover, the gripper can store several berries, which reduces the overall travel distance for the manipulator, and decreases the time needed to pick a single strawberry substantially. The experiments show that the gripper design decreased picking execution time noticeably compared to results found in literature.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2018
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages7384-7391
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781538630815
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 10 2018
Event2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2018 - Brisbane, Australia
Duration: May 21 2018May 25 2018

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2018
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityBrisbane
Period5/21/185/25/18

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Design and Evaluation of a Novel Cable-Driven Gripper with Perception Capabilities for Strawberry Picking Robots'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this