Design of a Tomato Harvesting Robot for Agricultural Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs)

Abstract

Recent problems in the world have highlighted the disadvantages of being a global village. Many countries have become over dependent on external sources for many basic commodities affecting the local primary sector. Food security is a major concern to small islands states like Mauritius and one major issue is the high cost of production and labor scarcity. Artificial intelligence can now be used to support the local entrepreneurs in their businesses, but the major problem is barrier to the introduction of new technologies due to lack of technical support to the local entrepreneurs. This project aims at the design of a system that is capable of harvesting tomatoes indoor in an autonomous way for an entrepreneur involved in Mauritius, who is currently facing various problems related mostly to a shortage of labour. The system was designed specifically for the company taking into consideration its requirements and constraints. The proposed system was a 3-axis robotic arm mounted on an Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) capable of picking tomatoes using computer vision for identification and recognition. The spatial location of the fruits was obtained by means of stereovision, which is a technique consisting of two cameras viewing the scene from two different positions and then through triangulation, the real-world coordinates of the tomatoes were extracted. Using this information, the robotic arm was able to pluck and store the tomatoes. The AGV, on the other hand, was used to transport the robotic arm throughout the greenhouse and line following was employed so that the vehicle achieved an autonomous behaviour. The time for the robotic arm to harvest and store one tomato was approximately ten seconds, but this slow speed was compensated by the system’s ability to work for four hours straight and multiple shifts after charging.