A Novel Design of Robotic Fruit Plucking Manipulator Using a Sliding Cutter for Agricultural Drones and Robots

In recent years, especially the post-pandemic era where labor force scarcity has emerged as a concern seeking rising issue, robotics and automation in agriculture sector have stood up as a solution for this problem. Also, to fulfill the demand of exponentially rising population in world, dependency on unskilled labor should be turned into usage of more technology in agriculture like robots, drones, etc., to avoid crop loss due to negligence and mishandling of harvest. In this paper, a novel design of robotic fruit plucking manipulator using sliding cutter for fruit plucking drones and robots is discussed. This manipulator is proposed to be used by robots and drones for fruit plucking using holding and peduncle cutting of fruit. Cutting peduncle of fruit instead of pulling and twisting of fruit by drones is beneficial in a way that it reduces the jerks faced by drones due to sudden break of abscission layer. For this design of manipulator for cutting peduncle of fruit, no specific identification of peduncle is necessary, making it easier to program for just fruit identification by computer vision system and not its stem. This will also minimize the impact of the damages caused to the fruit by the conventionally used multi-fingered grippers, which uses fruit plucking methods like pulling, twisting, bending, etc., because this method also offers peeling of skin of fruit, shaking tree branches which results in unnecessary fall of other fruits and leaves and other harms causing losses.