TRIZ-AIDED DESIGN AND EXPERIMENT OF KIWIFRUIT PICKING END-EFFECTOR

Currently kiwifruit picking process mainly leverages manual labour, which has low productivity and high human effort, meanwhile the existing kiwifruit picking machinery also has low picking efficiency and easily damages fruits. In this regard within this paper, a multi-fruit envelope-cutting kiwifruit picking end-effector was designed by applying TRIZ assistance. Firstly, a common kiwifruit picking end-effector was selected as the prototype system. The functional analysis method of TRIZ was applied to identify the functional defects of the system. TRIZ solution tools such as technical contradiction analysis, substance-field analysis, and trimming were utilized to improve and innovate the system, resulting in the design of a kiwifruit picking end-effector that recognizes fruits, envelops fruit clusters, cuts and separates fruit stalks, and is capable of picking kiwifruit in clusters. Then, simulation software ADAMS was applied to perform gait simulation of the end-effector picking action to verify the smoothness and coherence of the picking process. Finally, a kiwifruit picking test stand was set up to conduct picking tests in the form of fruit clusters. The results showed that the average time to pick each cluster of fruits was 8.8 s, the picking success rate was 89.3%, and the picking damage rate was 6.0%. All the indicators were better than the prototype and met the expected design requirements.