A strawberry harvest‐aiding system with crop‐transport collaborative robots: Design, development, and field evaluation
Published in Jounal of Field Robotics (JFR), 2021
Mechanizing the manual harvesting of fresh market fruits constitutes one of the biggest challenges to the sustainability of the fruit industry. During manual harvesting of some fresh-market crops like strawberries and table grapes, pickers spend significant amounts of time walking to carry full trays to a collection station at the edge of the field. A step toward increasing harvest automation for such crops is to deploy harvest-aid robots that transport the empty and full trays, thus increasing harvest efficiency by reducing pickers’ non-productive walking times. This work presents the implementation and integration of the co-robotic harvest-aid system and its deployment during commercial strawberry harvesting. The evaluation experiments demonstrated that the proof-of-concept system was fully functional. The co-robots improved the mean harvesting efficiency by around 10% and reduced the mean non-productive time by 60%, when the robot-to-picker ratio was 1:3. The concepts developed in this work can be applied to robotic harvest-aids for other manually harvested crops that involve a substantial human-powered produce transport, as well as to in-field harvesting logistics for highly mechanized field crops that involve coordination of harvesters and autonomous transport trucks.