Title: Autonomous Sweet Pepper Harvesting for Protected Cropping Systems,
Abstract: In this letter, we present a new robotic harvester (Harvey) that can
autonomously harvest sweet pepper in protected cropping environments. Our
approach combines effective vision algorithms with a novel end-effector design
to enable successful harvesting of sweet peppers. Initial field trials in
protected cropping environments, with two cultivar, demonstrate the efficacy of
this approach achieving a 46% success rate for unmodified crop, and 58% for
modified crop. Furthermore, for the more favourable cultivar we were also able
to detach 90% of sweet peppers, indicating that improvements in the grasping
success rate would result in greatly improved harvesting performance.