A Novel End-effector for Tomato Harvesting Robot: Mechanism and Evaluation

The application of robots to the agricultural sector has significantly improved productivity in the field. Studies investigating various forms of end-effectors are being carried out constantly, especially in relation to the harvests of fruits that require a lot of labor. However, the majority of studies focus on stably cutting the pedicel after accurately recognizing the target, while there is relatively little interest in the method and process of transferring agricultural produce after the harvest. The development of a dedicated end-effector is essential to reduce the duration of the entire procedure, which is a significant goal in harvest-related research. This entails comprehensive consideration of the transfer process. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose an integrated end-effector, which enables almost simultaneous execution of harvesting and transfer of tomatoes. Further, a modular mechanism is introduced to improve the performance of harvesting robots, and future directions of research are outlined.