Vision system simplifies robotic fruit picking

Robotic apple picker relies on a camera inside the gripper and off-the-shelf components and software. The European standard height of fruit trees on professional plantations must be between two and three meters. The ACRO automated fruit-picking machine (AFPM) harvester uses a unique vacuum-gripper design to pick the fruit and ease coordination between the vision system and robot controller. Mounted behind a common agriculture tractor, the AFPM platform supports a Panasonic industrial robot to “pick” the fruit (see Fig. 1).

The AFPM apple harvester also consists of a tractor-driven generator for power supply, a horizontal stabilization unit, a seventh external vertical axis to enlarge the operation range, a SICK safety scanning device, a Siemens central control unit, and touch panel PC with human-machine interface (HMI). MVTec Software’s Halcon image processing software provides the robot guidance coordinates, while a canopy and curtain, which can be folded up during transportation, reduce the affects of ambient light (see Fig. 2). The AFPM needs one driver on the tractor while it effectively handles the workload of six workers.

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