A Bionic Flexible Spring Comb Finger for Chili Picking Machine with Oblique Double Spiral Comb Fingers

China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of chili peppers, but also one of the world’s largest exports of chili peppers. With the continuous expansion of the region that likes to eat chili peppers, the market demand for chili peppers shows a strong growth momentum, the industry has broad prospects for development. As automation and intelligent technologies continue to advance, the evolution towards intelligent mechanization for pepper harvesting has emerged as an inevitable and paramount trend. In this paper, the mechanical structure design of the bionic flexible spring comb finger is adopted for the comb finger structure of the pepper picking machine. Combined with theoretical calculation and simulation analysis, the design of the bionic flexible spring comb finger is ensured to meet the requirements of strength and other performance indexes. The performance of the bionic flexible spring comb finger is further verified in the experimental test. To reduce the damage rate of pepper fruit and pepper plants, a new solution is proposed to meet the picking efficiency and quality at the same time.