• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.23 no.6
• /
• pp.629-634
• /
• 1998

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.

• The Journal of Korea Robotics Society
• /
• v.16 no.1
• /
• pp.49-55
• /
• 2021

Recently, a smart farm technology is drawing attention as an alternative to the decline of farm labor population problems due to the aging society. Especially, there is an increasing demand for automatic harvesting system that can be commercialized in the market. Pre-harvest crop detection is the most important issue for the harvesting robot system in a real-world environment. In this paper, we proposed a real-time tomato instance tracking algorithm by using deep learning and probability models. In general, It is hard to keep track of the same tomato instance between successive frames, because the tomato growing environment is disturbed by the change of lighting condition and a background clutter without a stochastic approach. Therefore, this work suggests that individual tomato object detection for each frame is conducted by YOLOv3 model, and the continuous instance tracking between frames is performed by Kalman filter and probability model. We have verified the performance of the proposed method, an experiment was shown a good result in real-world test data.

• Smart Media Journal
• /
• v.12 no.10
• /
• pp.19-28
• /
• 2023

In the fruit harvesting field, interest in automatic robot harvesting is increasing due to various seasonality and rising harvesting costs. Accurate apple detection is a difficult problem in complex orchard environments with changes in light, vibrations caused by wind, and occlusion of leaves and branches. In this paper, we introduce a dataset and an adaptive heatmap regression model that are advantageous for robot automatic apple harvesting. The apple dataset was labeled with not only the apple location but also the visibility. We propose a method to detect the center point of an apple using an adaptive heatmap regression model that adjusts the Gaussian shape according to visibility. The experimental results showed that the performance of the proposed method was applicable to apple harvesting robots, with MAP@K of 0.9809 and 0.9801 when K=5 and K=10, respectively.

• Journal of Drive and Control
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.65-71
• /
• 2024

In this study, we suggested a key-point detection method for robot harvesting of oriental melon. Our suggested method could be used to detect the detachment part and major composition of oriental melon. We defined four points (harvesting point, calyx, center, bottom) based on tomato with characteristics similar to those of oriental melon. The evaluation of estimated key-points was conducted by pixel error and PDK (percentage of detected key-point) index. Results showed that the average pixel error was 18.26 ± 16.62 for the x coordinate and 17.74 ± 18.07 for the y coordinate. Considering the resolution of raw images, these pixel errors were not expected to have a serious impact. The PDK score was found to be 89.5% PDK@0.5 on average. It was possible to estimate oriental melon specific key-point. As a result of this research, we believe that the proposed method can contribute to the application of harvesting robot system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Agricultural Machinery Conference
• /
• 1993.10a
• /
• pp.820-829
• /
• 1993

We have developed an agricultural hydraulic robot to operate in the agricultural field. Using the robot, automatic harvesting experiments of watermelon were done. The results are as follows. First, the gripper should be modified its finger. Second, the manipulator and the gripper should be known precisely about dynamic characteristics of them in order to control adequately. Therefore, a new gripper was manufactured on trial by modifying its finger, and in order to known dynamic characteristics of the manipulator and the new gripper, the system identification was carried out with experiments.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
• /
• v.16 no.4
• /
• pp.749-754
• /
• 2021

In order to solve problems such as a decrease in the agricultural population and an aging population, research on agricultural robots is being actively conducted for the purpose of automating various agricultural tasks. The harvesting process is the most labor-intensive process among farm work and this process consumes about 2-3 times more compared to other processes. Since the transport of agricultural crops requires the most labor costs and there is a risk of injury during the operation, automating the transport operation through an agricultural robot can improve safety and significantly improve productivity. Therefore, this paper proposes an agricultural robot that is optimized for farm worksites and capable of autonomous driving.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
• /
• v.39 no.2
• /
• pp.134-141
• /
• 2014

Purposes: This study was to validate the Robotic Smart Work System that can provides better working conditions and high productivity in unstructured environments like bio-industry, based on a tele-operation system for fruit harvesting with low cost 3-D positioning system on the laboratory level. Methods: For the Robotic Smart Work System for fruit harvesting and cultivation management in agriculture, a vision based tele-operating system and 3-D position information are key elements. This study proposed Robotic Smart Farming, an agricultural version of Robotic Smart Work System, and validated a 3-D position information system with a low cost omni camera and a laser marker system in the lab environment in order to get a vision based tele-operating system and 3-D position information. Results: The tasks like harvesting of the fixed target and cultivation management were accomplished even if there was a short time delay (30 ms ~ 100 ms). Although automatic conveyor works requiring accurate timing and positioning yield high productivity, the tele-operation with user's intuition will be more efficient in unstructured environments which require target selection and judgment. Conclusions: This system increased work efficiency and stability by considering ancillary intelligence as well as user's experience and knowhow. In addition, senior and female workers will operate the system easily because it can reduce labor and minimized user fatigue.