Under Test: Crop Picking Robots with Customized Hands
Automation-intensive sectors such as the automotive industry are not the only ones to rely on robots. In more and more agricultural settings, automation systems are superseding strenuous manual labor.
In Germany, cucumbers destined for pickle jars are harvested by hand with the aid of “cucumber flyers” – farm vehicles with wing-like attachments. Seasonal workers lie on their stomachs on the vehicle’s wings and pluck the ripe cucumbers. This labor-intensive and energy-sapping type of manual harvesting is increasingly becoming uneconomical. In addition, the per-unit costs of harvesting have risen since Germany introduced a minimum wage.
Credit: © Photo Fraunhofer IPK
CATCH researchers want to develop and test a dual-arm robot system consisting of inexpensive lightweight modules. The ultimate aim: this system could be used for automated cucumber farming and other agricultural applications. The robotic picker would have to be cost-effective, high-performance and dependable. Even in adverse weather, it would need to be capable of first identifying ripe cucumbers and then using its two gripper arms to gently pick and store them. To this end, cutting-edge control methods equip the robot with tactile perception and enable it to adapt to ambient conditions.
High success rate
It is a considerable challenge to design autonomous systems capable of optical and tactile sensing, assessing and evaluating. The challenge is only compounded by cucumber harvesting: a robot must identify green objects camouflaged by green surroundings. In addition, cucumbers are randomly distributed throughout a field, and some are concealed by vegetation. Varying light conditions make the mission all the more difficult.
A prototype of the dual-arm robot system during the first field tests.
© Photo Fraunhofer IPK
It should be possible to use multispectral cameras and intelligent image processing to help locate cucumbers and guide the robot’s gripper arms to pluck them. This part of the CATCH project is overseen by CSIC-UPM, the Spanish project partner. A special camera system helps ensure that the robot detects and locates approximately 95 percent of cucumbers, an impressive success rate. The goal, of course, is to advance the technology so that the robot picks all the ripe cucumbers to foster growth of new ones. Fraunhofer IPK has developed robot arms with five degrees of freedom on the basis of hardware modules developed by igus GmbH in Cologne.
The IPK project experts are tasked with developing three gripper prototypes: a gripper based on vacuum technology, a set of bionic gripper jaws (Fin Ray®) and a customized “cucumber hand” based on OpenBionics robot hands. They are relying on insights acquired during a previous European research project, in which they developed a dual-arm robot control system with efficient task-oriented programming for Workerbot I – a humanoid robot capable of industrial assembly. Project experts from IPK are enhancing this system so that it can plan, program and control the behavior of robots harvesting cucumbers.
In July 2017, the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy used various types of cucumbers to conduct initial field testing of the robot system at its test site. The institute also tested harvesting new types of cucumbers with distinguishing features that make them easier to pick. In short, the first round of testing validated basic functionality. Since fall 2017, project partners have been conducting additional tests in a Leibniz Institute greenhouse.
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2018/02/under-test-crop-picking-robots-with.html
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