Autonomous Fruit Picking Machine: A Robotic Apple Harvester

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt età la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, ´ emanant desétablissements d'enseignement et de recherche français oú etrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. Summary. This paper describes the construction and functionality of an Autonomous Fruit Picking Machine (AFPM) for robotic apple harvesting. The key element for the success of the AFPM is the integrated approach which combines state of the art industrial components with the newly designed flexible gripper. The gripper consist of a silicone funnel with a camera mounted inside. The proposed concepts guarantee adequate control of the autonomous fruit harvesting operation globally and of the fruit picking cycle particularly. Extensive experiments in the field validate the functionality of the AFPM.