Automatic Vertical Farming Harvesting System

The aim of this project was to not only develop an optimal warehouse shelving plan that would allow for the greatest possible usage of energy and space while reducing costs, but to also develop a fully automated robot that could harvest the plants without the need for transporting cells or having workers manually care take. This prototype was only constrained to harvesting strawberries and did not feature any additional systems, such as water and light systems.

The harvesting robot was designed to recognize strawberries using computer vision technology and harvest them via a robotic arm with 6 degrees of freedom. The prototype also included a scalable shelving architecture with troughs for the strawberries and a railing system for the harvesting robot to maneuver across.

The robot was designed to detect a ripe strawberry along the trough via a depth camera and computer vision. This would signal the linear drives to move the robot to the region of the strawberry and then have the arm move to the location of the strawberry. The claw (end effector) was designed to cut the stem of the strawberry, which would be pulled towards the claw via a vacuum pipe connected to it, and would fall into the vacuum pipe leading it to a storage basket that was below the robot.