Personal Root-Vegetable Harvesting Assist Device for Japanese Radish

This paper introduces a personal assist device to harvest root vegetables such as radishes which are a representative crop planted by many farmers in Japan. Specifically, our research work tries to solve problems by developing a novel assit deive that is compact, inexpensive, and easy to handle by anyone, and that can reduce the burden on users. As a solution approach, two mechanisms embedded in the proposed assist device are designed and developed: 1) grasping mechanism for grabbing crops and 2) digging mechanism for raising crops buried in the ground. The design of this harvesting assist device based on these mechanisms and its features are explained in detail in our paper. The effectiveness of the assist device was verified through extensive experiments in a farm field. To enhance the feasibility and efficiency of the harvesting device, our future work includes the study direction of stable grasping for different sizes and shapes according to crops.