Present situation and development of mobile harvesting robot

Fruit-harvesting robot is the vital important equipment of precision agriculture in the 21st century and future trend of intelligent agricultural machinery. A mobile harvesting robot consists of manipulator, end-effector, mobile wheels, machine vision and control system and so on. Configuration and degree-of-freedoms of manipulator have an effect on intelligent control complexity, operation agility and accuracy of harvesting robot. Auto-navigation of mobile wheel and machine vision system, which are key parts of harvesting robot, were in charge of self-navigation and fruits localization respectively. This paper outlined present research situations of mobile harvesting robot and pointed out technical problems confronting harvesting robot. Solutions including open architecture control system were presented.