Fruit perception system for robotic harvesting

Abstract

The fruit perception system for a robotic harvester acquires and processes fruit detection and localization information to enable a robotic manipulator arm to connect with a targeted fruit. The system includes multiple embodiments, but comprises at least one RGB-D camera and one horizontally slidable line scan laser. The system uses the RGB-D camera data and a planning algorithm to identify a specific target fruit to pick first. The line scan laser paints the surface of the target fruit with a laser line and the RGB-D camera extracts line scan laser image data and communicates the line scan laser image data to a controller/processor. The controller/processor processes the extracted laser line image data and determines the xyz position of the centroid of the target fruit, so that the controller/processor directs a manipulator arm to pick the fruit.