Lemon Harvesting Robot

The demand for agricultural products around the world is increasing at an unprecedented rate. In the next 30 years, an estimated 50% increase in agricultural production is required to provide enough food, nutrients and minerals to the world's population. Despite the world's expanding population

Project Title

Lemon Harvesting Robot

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

The demand for agricultural products around the world is increasing at an unprecedented rate. In the next 30 years, an estimated 50% increase in agricultural production is required to provide enough food, nutrients and minerals to the world's population. Despite the world's expanding population, which is expected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, agriculture is experiencing a rising labor crisis due to an elderly farmer and rapid urbanization.The traditional method of harvesting is extremely labor intensive and inefficient in terms of both cost and time. Machine harvesting systems offer a partial solution to these problems because they efficiently remove fruits from trees, lowering harvesting costs to roughly 35-45 percent of total production costs. Mechanical harvesting systems are designed to remove a large amount of fruit in a short amount of time during the harvesting season.To loosen mature fruits, this method has been used with pre-harvest agents such as shakers or air blasts linked with chemical mechanics of abscission.If these methods were used, the fruits could be damaged by being impacted by the branches of the tree during the fall or by the tree directly falling on the ground, and therefore fruit would lose quality and would this result in a reduction of trading income from the fresh produce market.Also, there is the chance of detaching unripen or small, immature fruits by shaking the trunk or branches of a tree. Again, manpower will be required to collect the fruits dropped on the ground after shaking, resulting in increased labor and harvesting operation costs.Increased automation and robotization are urgently needed in the agricultural business to fulfil rising demand, maintain fruit quality, and compensate for manpower shortages.Wheat, corn, and rice crops ripen uniformly on the field, allowing for effective bulk harvesting of the crop by large equipment at a single point in time. Multiannual crops such as apple, orange, and lemon, on the other hand, require selective picking of only the fruits while ensuring that the plant is not destroyed during the harvesting process.Selective harvesting has been difficult to automate, thus it is currently carried out by humans. This opens the platform for implementing selective harvesting as current system is one of the most labor-intensive and expensive with major issue is the need of more farmers for cultivation and harvesting of more yield.The task of selective harvesting, however, is not an easy one for robots, which is illustrated by the fact that there are hardly any selective-harvesting robots on the market as there few step like fruit recognition,mechanism for the robot for the efficient grasping and removal of the fruit as well so that there is no damage to the plant , are to be considered for selective harvesting, to address this issue, we have come up with the concept of a selective harvesting robot system for harvestinn lemons.

Project Objectives

The objective of the project include

• To design the mechanism for the movement of the robot using line following.
• To develop a recognition system to identify and locate the lemon using image processing.
• To design and develop a mechanical structure for grasping and cutting operation using robotic arm.

Project Implementation Method

We have made the line following system for the movement of the robot .

For the line following system, first we have designed the circuit on the Fritzing Software of which the software simulation is given below, the circuit in the hardware was implemented using these connection. The simulation is shown below

Figure 1: Line following model on Fritzing Software

After implementing and testing the circuit on the software, we moved to the hardware implementation. We gathered the information and analyzed the hardware required for completing the objective. Our target was to making a moving system for the robot by using the line following approach so for that first of all we designed the chassis, After that we bought the tires to withstand the weight of the chassis and structure that we need to add afterwards on the chassis, the weight that we estimated was 10-15 kg. After buying the wheel for the chassis our next step was to buy motors that could rotate the wheels of chassis for the autonomous movement of the robot, we choose the 12V dc gear motor of 70 rpm. The figure below shows the initial structure of the robot with the chassis, motor and tires attached.

Figure 2: Initial structure of robot

Once the initial structure of the robot was complete and the chassis was on its wheel. Then we made the line following system of the robot . The IR sensors is installed on the front-down side of the robot to sense the line and sends those reading to the Arduino which perform the further operations For the steering mechanism four wheels are used, two wheels are on the back part connected with the motors and two independent wheel on the front part of the robot.. IR sensors are giving analog reading to Arduino depends on the IR ray reflectance. For accuracy left sensor reading average and right sensor reading average will decide the movement of the robot. H-Bridge is used to drive the motor of the each wheel. Then the Arduino controls the whole robot actions of movement of the robot whether which of the motor need to work and stop depending on the reading of the IR sensor and the method, the coding was done through Arduino IDE. In this way our moving system of the robot was completed. The figure below shows the motor working on IR sensor readings.

Figure 3: Motor movement

The design of the robot looked like this after installing the line following system on the robot.

Figure 4: Line following system of robot

Then we moved to the second objective which is to develop a recognition system to identify and locate the lemon. For this objective, we have used Jetson Nano Developer Kit to carry out the image processing of lemon first we collected the dateset of the lemona dn performed annotation for the indentification of lemon in the picture and after the annoatation we made a model for the detection and locating of the lemon using AI and deep learning algorithm and deployed the model into the jetson nano and checked the results. The real time results are shown belo

Currently working on 3rd objective.

Benefits of the Project

Agriculture harvesting robots have become an urgent need in many developing countries that rely heavily on agriculture for food, employment, income, and social stability. The agriculture industry is plagued by numerous issues, including a reduction in number of farm workers and rising fruit harvesting costs. With rising urbanization and a labor shortage, the use of agriculture harvesting robots has the potential to boost productivity, reduce waste, and improve agricultural sustainability.This project has great potential in the harvesting sector of agriculture as it can bring up automation in harvesting which will ultimately help farmers in harvesting process by making the process far more efficient and enhance our agricultural infrastructure to extend our production of lemon.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Major Components Used:

• Jetson Nano Developer Kit 4GB
• Webcam
• Robotic Arm
• Motor Controller
• DC Battery

The lemon harvesting robot will go to the tree using the line following system and stop at the tree, then it will detect and locate the lemon using image processing algorithms , After detecting and locating the lemon the robot will decide which lemon to pluck first and then the robotic arm will reach the tree and pluck the lemon and place it in the storage box and similarly it will pluck all the lemon on that tree and store in storage box respectively.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Core Industry

Agriculture

Other Industries

Core Technology

Robotics

Other Technologies

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com