Challenges of Autonomous In-field Fruit Harvesting and Concept of a Robotic Solution

Tim Tiedemann, Florian Cordes, Matthis Keppner, Heiner Peters

2022

Abstract

Since the beginning of humans cultivating plants in fields, agriculture underwent a continuous shift from purely manual labor over simple machinery to more and more automated processes. Autonomous driving with navigation and self localization in the field is state of the art. Also, automated machines for fruit processing are available as well. In cases where the fruit is damageable and varies in size and shape, automated processing is challenging. One example of such damageable fruits are strawberries. Size, weight, and shape at the optimal ripeness can vary a lot. Additionally, a change from ripe to overripe occurs relatively quick and is sometimes hard to recognize. A further challenge when harvesting strawberries is a dense leafage that can cover the fruits partly or completely. In this paper, a concept of an autonomous in-field strawberry harvesting robot for non-elevated but ground-raised strawberry plants, with or without a tunnel, is presented. The robot is supposed to use multi-spectral imaging and machine learning based ripeness classification. Besides the overall concept, first data of this early-stage project is shown, too.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Tiedemann T., Cordes F., Keppner M. and Peters H. (2022). Challenges of Autonomous In-field Fruit Harvesting and Concept of a Robotic Solution. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO, ISBN 978-989-758-585-2, pages 508-515. DOI: 10.5220/0011321300003271

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icinco22,
author={Tim Tiedemann and Florian Cordes and Matthis Keppner and Heiner Peters},
title={Challenges of Autonomous In-field Fruit Harvesting and Concept of a Robotic Solution},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,},
year={2022},
pages={508-515},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0011321300003271},
isbn={978-989-758-585-2},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Informatics in Control, Automation and Robotics - Volume 1: ICINCO,
TI - Challenges of Autonomous In-field Fruit Harvesting and Concept of a Robotic Solution
SN - 978-989-758-585-2
AU - Tiedemann T.
AU - Cordes F.
AU - Keppner M.
AU - Peters H.
PY - 2022
SP - 508
EP - 515
DO - 10.5220/0011321300003271