Design and Control Architecture of a Triple 3 DoF SCARA Manipulator for Tomato Harvesting

• Type: Article in International Conference Proceedings Book
• Date: 2023

Authors

Tinoco, V (Author) Other; Silva, MF (Author) Other; Filipe Neves Santos (Author) FEUP; Magalhaes, S (Author) Other; Morais, R (Author) Other

Conference proceedings International

Title: 2023 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AUTONOMOUS ROBOT SYSTEMS AND COMPETITIONS, ICARSC

Pages: 87-92

IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Robot Systems and Competitions (ICARSC)

Tomar, PORTUGAL, APR 26-27, 2023

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 2 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-00Y-DP4

DOI: 10.1109/icarsc58346.2023.10129554

Abstract (EN): The increasing world population, growing need for agricultural products, and labour shortages have driven the growth of robotics in agriculture. Tasks such as fruit harvesting require extensive hours of work during harvest periods and can be physically exhausting. Autonomous robots bring more efficiency to agricultural tasks with the possibility of working continuously. This paper proposes a stackable 3 DoF SCARA manipulator for tomato harvesting. The manipulator uses a custom electronic circuit to control DC motors with an endless gear at each joint and uses a camera and a Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) for fruit detection. Cascaded PID controllers are used to control the joints with magnetic encoders for rotational feedback, and a time-of-flight sensor for prismatic movement feedback. Tomatoes are detected using an algorithm that finds regions of interest with the red colour present and sends these regions of interest to an image classifier that evaluates whether or not a tomato is present. With this, the system calculates the position of the tomato using stereo vision obtained from a monocular camera combined with the prismatic movement of the manipulator. As a result, the manipulator was able to position itself very close to the target in less than 3 seconds, where an end-effector could adjust its position for the picking.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 6