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Growing global demand for food, coupled with continuing labor shortages,motivates the need for automated agricultural harvesting. While some specialtycrops (e.g., apples, peaches, blueberries) can be harvested via existingharvesting modalities, fruits such as blackberries and raspberries requiredelicate handling to mitigate fruit damage that could significantly impactmarketability. This motivates the development of soft robotic solutions thatenable efficient, delicate harvesting. This paper presents the design,fabrication, and feasibility testing of a tendon-driven soft gripping systemfocused on blackberries, which are a fragile fruit susceptible to post-harvestdamage. The gripper is both low-cost and small form factor, allowing for theintegration of a micro-servo for tendon retraction, a near-infrared (NIR) basedblackberry ripeness sensor utilizing the reflectance modality for identifyingfully ripe blackberries, and an endoscopic camera for visual servoing with aUR-5. The gripper was used to harvest 139 berries with manual positioning intwo separate field tests. Field testing found an average retention force of2.06 N and 6.08 N for ripe and unripe blackberries, respectively. Sensor testsidentified an average reflectance of 16.78 and 21.70 for ripe and unripeblackberries, respectively, indicating a clear distinction between the tworipeness levels. Finally, the soft robotic gripper was integrated onto a UR5robot arm and successfully harvested fifteen artificial blackberries in a labsetting using visual servoing.

Tendon-Driven Soft Robotic Gripper with Integrated Ripeness Sensing for Blackberry Harvesting