Validation of a Multisensory System for Fruit Harvesting Robots in Lab Conditions

This paper presents a multisensory system for the detection and localisation of fruits that are candidates to be harvested by a robotic manipulator. The devices that have been selected as primary sensors for this purpose are a high resolution colour camera, a multispectral imaging system that consists of a motorised filter wheel, and a Time-Of-Flight 3D camera. A controlled lighting system completes the set-up. The progressive RGB camera and the multispectral imaging system acquire the basic data inputs for the detection of areas of interest that belong to the fruits, whereas the Time-Of-Flight 3D camera provides fast acquisition of accurate distances enabling the localisation of the targets in the coordinate space. Several experimental tests have been carried out in laboratory conditions in order to evaluate the capabilities of the proposed multisensory system.