Robotic applications on agricultural industry. A review

Abstract

Abstract In this paper we aim to present an evolution of the development of robotic end effectors with applications in fruit and vegetable harvesting but without exhaustively covering all technical solutions. This study is focused on robotic final effectors dedicated to harvesting fruits that have reached an advanced stage of development for apples, tomatoes, sweet peppers and cucumbers. The performances of these final effectors (harvesting speed, success rate, costs, etc.) are compared with the performances of human operators and we could say that so far the robots fail to reach the efficiency of human operators in the harvesting processes. The success rate is below 90% and the harvest times are longer than 10 seconds and this means a low efficiency. Although the level of commercial robots for fruit harvesting has not been reached, technological developments indicate an improvement in the performance of this category of robots, an increasing number of research projects are focused on tomato and apple harvesting technologies.