In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance.
@article{arxiv.1706.02023,
title = {Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems},
author = {Chris Lehnert and Andrew English and Chris McCool and Adam Tow and Tristan Perez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.02023},
year = {2017}
}