Jan 7, 2026 01:08 AM
https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1111636
INTRO: Tomatoes are an important vegetable crop worldwide, but their picking operations have long relied on manual labor, facing problems such as high labor intensity, high costs, and easy fruit damage. In protected tomato cultivation, fruits often grow in clusters with dense branches and leaves. Traditional mechanical picking equipment is prone to environmental interference, resulting in low picking success rates or high damage rates. How to achieve efficient and non-destructive picking of tomatoes in complex planting environments?
The team of Qizhi Yang from the School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, in collaboration with Dr. Min M. Addy et al. from the University of Minnesota (USA), has developed a rigid-flexible coupling end-effector integrating a telescopic suction cup and a three-finger gripper, providing an innovative solution to this problem. The related paper has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering.
This study innovatively adopts a collaborative “adhesion-clamping” operation mode. The end-effector first extends the vacuum sucker to adsorb the target tomato, pulls it out from the branches and leaves to avoid interference, and then activates the three-finger gripper to complete the clamping. This step-by-step operation process solves the defects of the traditional single clamping or adhesion methods——the former is easy to damage the fruit due to improper force, while the latter has insufficient stability affected by surface curvature and humidity... (MORE - details, no ads)
INTRO: Tomatoes are an important vegetable crop worldwide, but their picking operations have long relied on manual labor, facing problems such as high labor intensity, high costs, and easy fruit damage. In protected tomato cultivation, fruits often grow in clusters with dense branches and leaves. Traditional mechanical picking equipment is prone to environmental interference, resulting in low picking success rates or high damage rates. How to achieve efficient and non-destructive picking of tomatoes in complex planting environments?
The team of Qizhi Yang from the School of Agricultural Engineering, Jiangsu University, in collaboration with Dr. Min M. Addy et al. from the University of Minnesota (USA), has developed a rigid-flexible coupling end-effector integrating a telescopic suction cup and a three-finger gripper, providing an innovative solution to this problem. The related paper has been published in Frontiers of Agricultural Science and Engineering.
This study innovatively adopts a collaborative “adhesion-clamping” operation mode. The end-effector first extends the vacuum sucker to adsorb the target tomato, pulls it out from the branches and leaves to avoid interference, and then activates the three-finger gripper to complete the clamping. This step-by-step operation process solves the defects of the traditional single clamping or adhesion methods——the former is easy to damage the fruit due to improper force, while the latter has insufficient stability affected by surface curvature and humidity... (MORE - details, no ads)