Iranian Researchers Make Robotic Arm to Harvest Date Fruit
“In this plan, a robotic arm has been presented to harvest date fruits. A manipulator, traveling on a U-shaped rail with four prismatic joints and one revolute joint, has been designed and constructed to approach the fruits efficiently,” Parvin Mohammadi, one of the researchers of the plan, told ANA.
She explained that a manipulator, traveling on a U-shaped rail with four prismatic joints and one revolute joint, has been designed and constructed to approach the fruits efficiently, adding that the end-effector of the manipulator is an electric chainsaw capable of cutting the date bunch.”
“Two cameras are mounted on the manipulator in perpendicular directions to capture images, which are then transmitted to a decision-making unit to control the speed of the manipulator links,” Mohammadi said, adding that a decision-making unit that included three fuzzy inference systems uses the location data of the fruit bunch stems and the area of tree leaves in the images to determine the speed of electromotors of the trolley, horizontal link, and vertical link.
Noting that an artificial palm tree with dimensions similar to a real palm tree has also been made to evaluate the performance of the robot, she said that the performance of the robot was evaluated in various lighting conditions and the results showed that the introduced image processing algorithm could adequately detect the stems of the dates bunches with accuracy, precision, and recall of 0.88, 0.92, and 0.96, respectively, in suitable lighting, that is, when there was sufficient natural lighting.
She stated that the robot makes it possible to improve the capacity of using mechanized harvesting in date palm fields.
More than a dozen types of dates are mainly cultivated in six Iranian provinces, namely Kerman, Sistan and Balouchestan, Khuzestan, Hormuzgan, Bushehr and Fars, in the Southern, Southeastern and Southwestern parts of the country.
Iran is said to export around 20 percent of its overall production every year.
Per capita dates consumption in Iran is three kilograms per year.
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