Fruit detachment and classification method for strawberry harvesting robot

Fruit detachment and on-line classification is important for the development of harvesting robot. With the specific requriements of robot used for harvesting strawberries growing on the ground, a fruit detachment and classification method is introduced in this paper. OHTA color spaces based image segmentation algorithm is utilized to extract strawberry from background; Principal inertia axis of binary strawberry blob is calculated to give the pose information of fruit. Strawberry is picked selectively according to its ripeness and classified according to its shape feature. Histogram matching based method for fruit shape judgment is introduced firstly. Experiment results show that this method can achieve 93% accuracy of strawberry's stem detection, 90% above accuracy of ripeness and shape quality judgment on black and white background. With the improvement of harvesting mechanism design, this method has application potential in the field operation.