ASABE Technical Library - Abstract
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Locator Tool for Selective Robotic Harvesting
Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org
Citation: 2026 ASABE Annual International Meeting 2600420.(doi:10.13031/aim.202600420)Authors: Robert A. Conde, John K. Schueller, Jeremiah J. Blanchard, Joshua I. Arroyo, Alejandro S. Fluitt Martinez, Alessandro Giusti, Matthew J. Miles, Christian S. Veltchey
Keywords: harvesting, robot, fruit, vegetable, locator, RTK, tool, watermelon.
Abstract. After a half century of research and development by leading engineers, widespread commercial selective robotic harvesting of fruits and vegetables has not been achieved. Using robotic technologies to locate the fruit, select which ones are ready to harvest, detach the selected fruit, and harvest that fruit at a reasonable cost has been an elusive goal.
Many of the agricultural robotic attempts have been in commodities which feature small fruit located in three-dimensional plant structures. It may make more sense to initially robotize melons and other cucurbits as their fruit, being on the ground, surface makes it a two-dimensional problem. Additionally, their fruit being heavy makes manual picking slow and physically demanding; this makes automation more competitive. As such, robotic watermelon harvesting may be more competitive than other commodities.
Watermelon harvesting crews are generally divided into “cutters” and the more numerous “loaders”. The cutters find all the fruit, determine which are ripe, and cut the ripe fruit from its stem. The loaders pick up the cut fruit and load them onto a wagon, truck, or other vehicle. It would appear that the loading task would be easier to robotize than the cutting task if the locations of the fruit were known.
This project developed a tool which cutters can use to detach ripe melons and record their locations. The tool determines that a cut has been made and the precise location of the cut. That information can then be used to generate an accurate yield map of watermelon harvest. Such a yield map can also guide robotic harvesters. This tool also provides very useful precision agricultural information for farm management purposes.
The tool is compact and can be used without the cutter having to modify their operations. The real-time kinematic positioning (RTK) module (u-blox ZED-F9P) determines the centimeter-level accurate locations of the cut watermelons via a base-rover configuration. Extensive software was developed to accurately record the locations of the cuts, to store the data, and to generate maps.
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