To develop sensors for locating fruit by robotic harvesters.
Robotic harvesting requires sensors to detect and precisely locate all the fruit.
In many cases the robot must also determine ripeness in order to selectively harvest only the fruit ready for market. Additional studies are necessary to integrate the ripeness sensor into the robot cycle, to develop faster manipulators, to extend the functionality of the robot to perform other tasks such as transplanting and spraying, and to assess the market potential for this technology. A machine vision and image processing system capable of extracting and classifying these same features could be used to initiate a spot sprayer or other control technology. The general objective of this research is to develop sensor technologies which permit chemicals to be applied site-specifically on plants in a manner which minimizes the quantity required to control crop pests. The first step to complete these objectives is to create a database of multi-spectral, digital, images of plants which contain the desired features.