Development, Integration, and Field Evaluation of a Dual-Arm Ridge Cultivation Strawberry Autonomous Harvesting Robot

Strawberry harvesting is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task, and the shortage of labor resources and high production costs have made strawberry harvesting robots a focus of attention in both academia and industry. This paper presents a dual-arm strawberry harvesting robot suitable for ridge cultivation in polytunnels. The coordinated operation of the robot's software and hardware systems enables it to automatically harvest strawberries along the ridge. To ensure the integrity of the fragile fruit, a nondestructive end-effector was designed that can directly separate and grip the stem, avoiding contact with the fruit itself. Additionally, a method based on composite models was introduced to accurately determine the location and tilt direction of the picking points, to address the randomness in the growth direction of the stems. Furthermore, the modular five degrees-of-freedom robotic arm is better suited to the harvesting task requirements. Field evaluation results show that the robot achieves harvesting success rates between 98.4% and 57.4%, and destructive harvesting success rates vary between 98.4% and 75.0% across four scenarios of different complexities. Overall, the success rates for nondestructive and destructive harvesting reach 78.8% and 87.2%, respectively. The average harvesting cycle in the dual-arm working mode is 4.5 s per berry. Through an in-depth analysis of the results obtained, this paper also discusses the existing limitations and future research directions.