# Development of Continuum Robot Arm and Gripper for Harvesting Cherry Tomatoes
###### Abstract  
Smart farming technology is becoming of the actual topics in the modern world of technology. Contemporary farming technology expands robot applications by using AI for the recognition of variable patterns. Moreover, the agriculture field demands a safety robot, due to the fragile surrounded confined space and it must be adaptable to extremely constrained working environments. Therefore, this research paper presents a novel tomato harvesting robot arm based on a continuum robot structure. The proposed continuum robot arm flexible backbone structure provides safety and efficient work in a confined workspace. This research paper consists of three parts: the first part of the paper contains the robot design and the newly designed tomato harvesting gripper tool. The second part of the paper describes the machine learning part for detecting matured tomatoes and the distance measuring technique with a single camera. The third part of the research paper explains robot kinematics and control algorithms. The final part of the research paper explains the experimental results. As a result of the conducted experiment, the tomato harvesting speed of the proposed robot was 56 s for a single tomato. Meanwhile, the tomato recognition accuracy was 96 percent. tomato harvesting; gripper; continuum robot; tomato detection; design; agricultural robot sciences Article  
Development of Continuum Robot Arm and Gripper for Harvesting Cherry Tomatoes  
[PERSON]  
Additionally, the proposed design should be safe in the harvesting process, because the surrounding workspace environment is quite fragile for rigid bodies. The proposed tomato harvesting robotic system consists of three components: A moving platform to carry the manipulator, the manipulator based on a continuum robot structure, and a grasping tool. Additionally, the software part includes the tomato recognition algorithm and control process. In the 2010s researchers and scholars developed various types of robots for tomato harvesting, many researchers utilized KUKA, Universal Robots, and SCARA manipulators on mobile robot platforms to collect tomatoes in greenhouses [7; 8; 9]. However, commercially available manipulators are designed to work in a structured environment, which means in the factory or manufacturing area, where the workspace is always constant and presents no change. The agriculture field tends to change within the growing plants, such a variable working environment demands a new technical solution for harvesting robots [10]. One of the proposed technical solutions by Dr. [PERSON] proposed a continuum manipulator with a flexible structure, which has proven to be safe with wide reachability but possesses a low payload capacity [11]. Similar harvesting robot arms are proposed by [PERSON] et al. who designed and developed a cucumber harvesting robot arm with a thermal cutter, of which the successful harvesting rate was reported to be 74% [12; 13]. Furthermore, the competitive solution proposed by [PERSON] et al. proposed a dual-arm SCARA robot, where one arm holds a tomato and the other arm cuts the stem. This requires additional training for tomato stem detection, and the two arms must work synchronously with high precision [7]. A similar solution also had been proposed by [PERSON] et al. which used a UR robot manipulator with an RGBD camera for detection and a cutting tool for tomato separation [14]. Moreover, detaching the tomato is also challenging. For instance, [PERSON] et al. developed a gripper with a clamp mechanism to cut the stem after grasping the tomato [15], similar to [PERSON] et al. Furthermore, [PERSON] et al. proposed a plucking gripper with an infinite rotational joint to automatically detach tomatoes [16], but the success rate of detaching in the real application was only 60%. A similar gripper design has been also proposed by Root Ai Company as its Virgo robot has a SCARA-type arm that detaches tomatoes by twisting them after grasping [17].