MODELS AND ALGORITHMS FOR DESIGN ROBOTIC GRIPPER FOR AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTS

Fruit picking is a promising area for precision farming, and also faces many challenges in commercialization. In comparison to industrial manipulators, the gripper design for manipulating agricultural products is more complex due to the variety of colours, shapes, sizes of fruits; collected fruits have the same colour as the background of other plants, or are hidden by branches and leaves, etc. The conceptual model for describing the main components: object, sensors, gripper, manipulators and their influence is developed. The proposed technique for gripper design consists of four main steps, where object, environment, manipulator and gripper parameters are sequentially analyzed and determined. Using the proposed technique for gripper design and taking into account the analysis of existing end-effectors, various types of tomatoes processing methods, vacuum gripper the four-finger mechanical module with a built-in vacuum module was developed for tomato picking. The proposed model of end-effector of tomato differs in the use of mechatronic-vacuum modules for more reliable and safe processing of the fruits.