The growing popularity of kiwifruit orchards in New Zealand is increasing the already high demand for seasonal labourers. A novel robotic kiwifruit harvester has been designed and built to help meet this demand [H. A. Williams et al. Biosystems Eng. 181 (2019), pp. 140–156]. Early evaluations of the platform have shown good results with the system capable of harvesting 51.0% of 1,456 kiwifruit in four bays with an average cycle‐time of 5.5 s/fruit. However, the harvester's high cycle‐time, and high fruit loss rate at 23.4%, prevent it from being commercially viable. This paper presents two new developments for the harvesting system, a new vision system and two new gripper variations designed to overcome the harvester's previous limitations. Furthermore, we have designed and conducted the largest real‐world evaluation of a robotic fruit harvesting system published to date with over 12,000 kiwifruit involved. The results of this trial demonstrated that our kiwifruit harvester is one of the most effective selective fruit harvesters in the world capable of successfully harvesting 86.0% of reachable fruit, and 55.8% of all kiwifruit with a cycle‐time of 2.78 s/fruit.

中文翻译：

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机器人猕猴桃收获机的改进和大规模评估

新西兰奇异果园的日渐普及，已经增加了对季节性劳工的高需求。为了满足这一需求，设计并制造了一种新型的机器人奇异果收割机[HA Williams等。生物系统工程。181（2019），第140-156页]。该平台的早期评估显示了良好的结果，该系统能够在四个海湾中收获51.0％的1456个奇异果，平均周期为5.5 s /果。但是，收割机的高周期时间和较高的水果流失率（23.4％）阻碍了其在商业上的可行性。本文介绍了收割系统的两个新发展，一个新的视觉系统以及两个旨在克服收割机以前的局限性的新型夹持器。此外，我们设计并进行了迄今为止最大规模的对机器人水果收获系统的评估，该系统迄今已发布，涉及超过12,000个奇异果。该试验的结果表明，我们的奇异果收获机是世界上最有效的选择性水果收获机之一，能够成功收获86.0％的可到达水果，​​以及55.8％的所有奇异果，其周期时间为2.78 s /水果。