Fuzzy logic-based control for robot-guided strawberry harvesting: visual servoing and image segmentation approach

Abstract

The concept of digital farming can help farmers increase their agricultural production yield. One of the technologies to support digital farming is robotics, which can be utilized to complete a redundant task efficiently for 24 hours. This paper presents a simple and effective harvesting robot that is applied to harvest a ripe strawberry. The mechanical and electrical design is kept simple to ensure it is reproducible. The input from a proximity sensor and image detection by a Pi camera is utilized by FLC (Fuzzy Logic Controller) to improve the effectiveness of the harvesting task. The image processing method in this study is image segmentation, which fits with the limited source of the microcontroller available in the market. The experiment included 60 times (20 times center, left, and right position) harvesting using the FLC algorithm and 60 times without FLC to show the effectiveness of the proposed method. From 60 experiments without an FLC experiment, there is an 80% hit rate for strawberries positioned in the middle of an image plane and 55% for left and right strawberries. From 60 times of FLC experiment, 95% hit rate for strawberries positioned in the middle of an image plane, 80% for left and right strawberries. The average time required to finish the task without FLC for strawberries in the middle is 13.51 s, the left is 11.04 s, and the right is 17.28 s. While the average time required to finish the task with FLC for strawberry in the middle is 12.90 s, the left side is 11.71 s, and the right side is 10.93 s. This study is intended to show that simple designs can be helpful and affordable when applied to greenhouse farming in Indonesia.