Development of Automatic Lettuce Harvesting System for Plant Factory

식물 공장용 자동 상추 수확 시스템 개발

Factory-style plant production system aims to produce the standardized horticultural products with high quality and cleanness. In Korea, researches for year-round leaf vegetables production system are in progress and the most of them are focused on environment control. Automating technologies for harvesting, transporting and grading need to be developed. A lettuce harvesting system applicable to the plant factory was studied. It was composed of an articulated robot with a cutter and a gripper, lettuce feeding conveyor and air blower. Success rate of the developed system was 94.7 %. The system carried out harvesting a lettuce smoothly and the harvesting time was about 6 seconds per lettuce. The results showed a feasibility of robotic lettuce harvesting.