Developing a Realistic Simulation Environment for Robotics Harvesting Operations in a Vegetable Greenhouse

Abstract

Vegetable greenhouse operations are labour intensive. Automating some of these operations can save growers significant costs in an industry with low-profit margins. One of the most demanding operations is harvesting. Harvesting a tomato is a complex operation due to the significant clutter inherent to a greenhouse and the fragility of the object being grasped. Improving grasp and motion planning requires setting up a realistic testbed or testing on-site, which is expensive and time-limited to the growing season and specific environment. As such, it is important to develop a simulation environment to model this operation to help test various strategies before field testing can be conducted. Using the method presented in this work, 3D images are taken from a commercial greenhouse and used to develop a physics-based realistic simulation environment. The environment is then used to simulate a picking operation using various path planning algorithms to investigate the best algorithm to use in this case. The results show that this environment can be used to explore the best approaches to automate harvesting solutions in a vegetable greenhouse environment.