• 로봇학회논문지
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.107-114
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• 2020

In robotic harvesting, a gripper to manipulate the fruits needs to be attached to the robot system. We proposed a flexible robot gripper that can actively respond to the shape of an object such as fruits in the previous work. However, we found that there is a possibility of not being reliably gripped when the object slides during contact with a finger. In this paper, the improved gripper design is proposed to fundamentally solve the problems of the previous gripper. The position of the finger and the maximum closed position are changed, and the design improvement is performed to increase the grip stability by changing the installation angle of the link portion of the finger. Based on the improved design, a modified gripper is fabricated by 3-D printing, and then gripping experiments are performed on spherical object and fruit model object. It is shown that the gripper can stably grip the objects without excessive bending of the finger link of the gripper. The contact pressure between the finger and the surface of the object is measured, and it is verified that it is a sufficiently small pressure that does not cause damage to the fruit. Therefore, the proposed gripper is expected to be successfully applied in harvesting.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• 제15권2호
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• pp.421-441
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• 2021

Fruit detection in orchards is one of the most crucial tasks for designing the visual system of an automated harvesting robot. It is the first and foremost tool employed for tasks such as sorting, grading, harvesting, disease control, and yield estimation, etc. Efficient visual systems are crucial for designing an automated robot. However, conventional fruit detection methods always a trade-off with accuracy, real-time response, and extensibility. Therefore, an improved method is proposed based on coarse-to-fine multitask cascaded convolutional networks (MTCNN) with three aspects to enable the practical application. First, the architecture of Fruit-MTCNN was improved to increase its power to discriminate between objects and their backgrounds. Then, with a few manual labels and operations, synthetic images and labels were generated to increase the diversity and the number of image samples. Further, through the online hard example mining (OHEM) strategy during training, the detector retrained hard examples. Finally, the improved detector was tested for its performance that proved superior in predicted accuracy and retaining good performances on portability with the low time cost. Based on performance, it was concluded that the detector could be applied practically in the actual orchard environment.

• 로봇학회논문지
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• 제16권1호
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• pp.49-55
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• 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.

• 스마트미디어저널
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• 제12권10호
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• pp.19-28
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• 2023

과실 수확 분야에서 다양한 계절성과 수확 비용 상승 등으로 자동 로봇 수확에 대한 관심이 증가하고 있다. 빛의 변화, 바람에 의한 진동, 나뭇잎 및 가지 겹침 등 복잡한 과수원 환경에서 정확한 사과 검출은 어려운 문제이다. 본 논문에서는 로봇 자동 사과 수확에 유리한 데이터셋과 적응형 히트맵 회귀 모델을 소개한다. 사과 데이터셋은 사과 위치뿐만 아니라 가시성을 같이 레이블링하였다. 가시성에 따라 가우시안 모양을 조절하는 적응형 히트맵 회귀 모델을 사용하여 사과 중심점을 검출하는 방법을 제안한다. 실험 결과 MAP@K가 K=5와 K=10일 때 0.9809, 0.9801로 사과 수확 로봇에 응용 가능한 성능을 나타내었다.

• 한국농업기계학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국농업기계학회 1996년도 International Conference on Agricultural Machinery Engineering Proceedings
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• pp.638-647
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• 1996

Robot manipulators for harvesting fruits must be controlled to track the desired path of end-effector to avoid obstacles under the consideration of collision free area and safety path. This paper presents a robot path control algorithm to secure a collision free area with the recognition of work environments. The flexible space, which does not damage fruits or branches of tree due to their flexibility and physical properties , extends the workspace. Now the task is to control robot path in the extended workspace with the consideration of collision avoidance and velocity limitation at the time of collision concurrently. The feasibility and effectiveness of the new algorithm for redundant manipulators were tested through simulations of a redundant manipulator for different joint velocities.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• 제13권2호
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• pp.9-17
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• 1988

This study was carried out to develop an agricultural robot for fruit harvesting. As the first step an experimental manipulator and its control system were constructed. The articulated manipulator driven by DC motors has 3 degrees-of-freedom. The manipulator has a gripper adequate for fruit harvesting and an upper arm which forms a kind of guiding channel so thai harvested fruit can pass through. Point-to-point control of joints are accomplished by a digital control system with a PID controller which consists of optical shaft encoders, power amplifiers using PWM, a microcomputer and a software. The microcomputer also computes the positions of manipulator and sequence of motions. The motion of the manipulator was to slow and rough that it would need further improvement.

• 한국농업기계학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국농업기계학회 1993년도 Proceedings of International Conference for Agricultural Machinery and Process Engineering
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• pp.840-849
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• 1993

In this paper, it is reported that manipulator and hand-required for harvesting tomato were studied. At first, basic physical properties of tomato plant were investigated such as position of fruit, length of stems and leaves, width between ridges and son on . Secondly , basic mechanism of articulate manipulators with 5 to 7 degree of freedom were investigated by using evaluation indexes such as operational space, measure of manipulatability , posture diversity and so on. From the results, an articulate manipulator with 7 degrees of freedom was selected and the manipulator was manufactured as a trial according to the mechanism. Thirdly , physical properties about fruit and peduncle of tomato were also researched such as diameter, length , picking force and so on. Based on the properties , tomato harvesting hand with absorptive pad were also made as a trial. Finally, after the hand was attached to the manipulator, harvesting experiment was done in greenhouse . It was observed th t the robot could harvest satisfactorily , not only since the robot adapted to physical properties of tomato plant was manufactured but also since phyllotaxis of tomatoes was so methodical that all fruit clusters emerged in the same direction.

• 한국멀티미디어학회논문지
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• 제15권11호
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• pp.1273-1283
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• 2012

본 논문에서는 참외 수확로봇을 위한 비전 기반 참외 위치인지 알고리즘을 제시하였다. 입력된 영상의 RGB값을 HSI값으로 변환 후 Hue 값을 이용하여 이진화를 수행한 후에 참외 영역을 추출하였다. 형태학적 필터링을 이용하여 잡음을 제거한 후에 경계선 검출과 convex hull 기법을 이용하여 최외각 정점을 검출하였다. RANSAC 알고리즘에 의하여 참외에 대한 타원 정합을 수행하고 참외의 중심점, 장축 및 단축의 길이, 회전각도에 대한 정보를 획득하였다. 참외 모델에 대한 다양한 시뮬레이션 실험에 의해 제안한 방법의 유효성을 검증하였고, 실제 참외에 적용시켜 제안한 방법의 타당성을 확인하였다.

• 한국농업기계학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국농업기계학회 2000년도 THE THIRD INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON AGRICULTURAL MACHINERY ENGINEERING. V.III
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• pp.698-706
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• 2000

It is very difficult to mechanize tomato harvesting because identifying a tomato partly covered with leaves and stalks is not easy. This research was conducted to develop tomato harvesting robot which can identify a target tomato, determine its three dimensional position, and harvest it in a limited time. Followings were major findings in this study. The first visual system of the harvesting robot was composed of two CCD cameras, however, this could not detect tomatoes which are not seen on the view finder of the camera especially those partly covered by leaves or stalks. The second visual device, combined with two CCD cameras and pan/tilt procedures was designed to minimize the positioning errors within ${\pm}10mm$, but this is still not enough to detect tomatoes partly covered with leaves etc. Finally, laser distance detector was added to the visual system that could reduce the position detecting errors within 10mm in X-Y direction and 5mm in Z direction for the partly covered tomatoes.

• Journal of Biosystems Engineering
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• 제31권1호
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• pp.52-58
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• 2006

Various robots were developed for harvesting fruits and vegetables. However, each robot was designed for a specific task such as harvesting apples or vegetables. This has been a big hurdle in application of robots to agriculture. A new type of hybrid manipulator with both parallel and serial joints was developed and designed to apply to various kinds of field operations. The hybrid manipulator had 2 extra degree of freedom in serial joints which made it flexible in switching one to the other type of hybrid manipulator, for example, PUMA to SCARA. And it was designed to harvest heavy fruits such as musky melons or water melons even behind leaves or branches of tree. This hybrid manipulator showed less than $\pm1mm$ position error. It was concluded that the hybrid manipulator was an effective and feasible tool to perform various works and to increase working performance.