Scenario: Developing robots to harvest raspberries is crucial for addressing labour shortages in agriculture, particularly for crops like raspberries that require delicate handling. Raspberries are fragile and must be picked at just the right ripeness, making automation vital to ensure consistent quality and reduce waste. Robotic harvesting also increases efficiency, allowing farmers to meet growing demand while reducing labour costs and ensuring a more sustainable and scalable approach to fruit production.

Goal: In five minutes, you must harvest as many ripe fruit without damaging, whilst leaving any non-ripe fruit on the plant, and you must sort them by size (small and large), so they are graded.

Specifications

• The gripper should use no more than 3 actuators
• The gripper should have a size which can fit in to a volume of 25 x 20 x 20 cm when in a compressed state. It can go outside this space during operation
• The gripper must be able to be mounted on the end of the robot end effector (supplied)
• To robot arm can be manually moved down up/down above the item until at a desired height, the gripper control can then be activated with a single key press, and a button pressed on the interface to the robot arm to trigger a downwards motion of 10-15cm. The robot can then manually moved to the deposite box (vertical and horizontal translation only).
• The identification of the object (ripe/not-ripe and small/large) should be printed to a laptop screen (via. serial monitor, or other) or by indicators on your system (e.g. LEDs or similar)
• There is a maximum of 5 minutes to attempt as many raspberries as possible. If there is any issue beyond your control (e.g. robot arm issues or other, we will stop the timer, and reset the system).
• Teams have one minute to assemble the gripper onto the robot.

Soft Fruit Objects

The raspberries are of varying color, ‘plant’ stiffness. There are two types of ripeness:

• Ripe fruit will be red and should be harvested.
• Un ripe should be left on the plant. This will be white.

There are also two sizes, and these must be put into appropriate boxes depending on their size:

• Large fruit (approximately 30mm in diameter).
• Small fruit (approximately 20mm in diameter)

The dimensions of the raspberry and its inner ‘plant’ structure are given as: