Development of an automatic fruit picking robot based on object detection algorithm

Robots are increasingly involved in human production, which leads to a qualitative leap in production efficiency. In the agricultural field, especially in the process of harvest, it needs a lot of human resources to perform various tasks, such as picking fruits, which may be labor intensive. An effective robotics picking system can solve this problem to a large extent. This dissertation aims to develop a robot system for automatic picking based on a real-time CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) algorithm, that is, YOLO (You Only Look Once). In this project version 3 of YOLO is used based on Keras to detect ripe fruits(kumquat) and RGB-D camera is used to obtain the physical coordinates of the fruits. After locating the objects, an industrial manipulator UR5e robot is programmed to pluck the fruits automatically.Master of Science (Computer Control and Automation