prior to the design and construction of any fruit harvesting machine it is essential to know the physical and mechanical properties of the trees and of its fruits. an example could be cited as the force needed to overcome. the strength with which the fruit is attached to the stem, in trunk shaker harvesting. in this research the acting forces on the fruit during harvest, including tensile stren...

Studies on harvesting robots with manipulator were started with the tomato fruit harvesting robot since 30 years ago by Prof. Kawamura, Kyoto University [1]. The robot consisted of a 5 DOF manipulator, a harvesting end-effector, a color TV camera which was used for stereo vision, and a battery car for traveling in the ridges as shown in Figure 1. Following the harvesting robot, the robotic tech...

Development of mechanical harvesters have been important research objectives for research scientists in Land-Grant Institutions, in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and in private industry in recent years. These developments have resulted in a revolution in mechanical harvesting and resulted in the need for new handling methods for the mechanically harvested crop. Quality of the raw p...

in this research, the effect of variety, harvesting time and fruit size were investigated on the mechanical properties of skin, density and mechanical strength. the results showed that pomegranate cultivars (ardestani, shisheh-cap and malas) had different skin thickness resulting difference in forces required for penetration of pomegranate fruit (10%). the skin of shisheh-cap variety was thicke...

the aim of this study was to determine the most suitable shaking frequency and amplitude for shake harvesting esfahan's edible fig (ficus carica cv. sabz). a hand held limb shaker with adjustable shaking frequency and amplitude was used for this study. a 3x3 factorial experiment with three levels of oscillating frequency (10, 12 and 14 hz) and three levels of shaking amplitude (20, 32.5 and 45 ...

The losses in fruits and vegetables in various postharvest operations remained high in which tomato is one of the major vegetable fruit. Tomato is a sensitive vegetable whose quality is substantially reduces due to physical damage encountered by various mechanical forces in harvesting, handling and other postharvest operation. In this study an attempt was made to determine mechanical properties...

In the pineapple sector of Benin, poor fruit quality prevents pineapple producers to enter the European market. We investigated effects of common cultural practices, flowering and maturity synchronisation, (1) to quantify the trade-offs of flowering and maturity synchronisation for pineapple quality and the proportion of fruits exportable to European markets, and (2) to determine the effect of ...