Robotic Cucumber Harvester

Feb-19-18 A two-armed robot could help keep German cucumber farms producing.

Cucumbers are extremely labor-intensive to harvest, requiring workers to scoot through the rows on their stomachs, and some regions are struggling to keep their crops commercially viable.

To keep their cucumbers at home, the team from Fraunhofer created a dual-arm robot as part of the EU’s CATCH (Cucumber Gathering – Green Field Experiments) project. Still in development, the prototype robot will be able to identify ripe cucumbers and pick them without damage to the vegetable or plant.

Currently, the team has three prototypes grippers in the works, a gripper based on vacuum technology, a set of bionic gripper jaws, and a special “cucumber hand” based on the robot hands created by OpenBionics.

More Info about this Invention:

[NEWATLAS.COM]
[FRAUNHOFER.DE]

---